


31 Days Until We Make It Home

by theoneandonlybunny



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Female Peter Parker, Hurt Peter Parker, Irondad, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker Whump, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 40,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26891161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoneandonlybunny/pseuds/theoneandonlybunny
Summary: A loose collection of drabbles for Whumptober. Inspired by the great @emily_F6 and her epic portrayal of Penny Parker.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 92
Kudos: 193
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	1. Let's Hang Out Sometime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 1: Waking Up Restrained

Penny Parker woke up blinking, in a place she didn’t recognize, and with painfully-tight zip ties around her wrists.

Her mouth tasted gross, a sign that she’d been out for a while, and as she looked around she tried to take stock of where she was and how she felt. It looked like a generic industrial warehouse, nothing too fancy, but she was clearly inside a clear box that looked like it had bulletproof or at least shatterproof glass on all four sides. While her head was foggy, there didn’t feel like there was anything to suggest head trauma. She was sore, like she’d been handled roughly, but there didn’t feel like anything was so bad that she needed medical attention.

Penny struggled to sit up, to get at least partially off the cold floor, and when she did she noticed her ankle was messed up, Great. But how did she get here? She couldn’t remember, but she was in civilian clothes, not her costume, so she hadn’t been out swinging when whatever happened to land her here happened.

A few minutes after she sat up, a tall man came into the room. He was wearing dark clothing, with cargo pants, and he held himself like he had military training – the same way Sam, Bucky and Steve did. The man crouched down in front of her, and suddenly she felt a shiver crawl through her.

“Hello, Miss Parker,” he said, watching her. “How kind of you to wake up early. With what we gave you, we didn’t expect you to be awake for another couple of hours.”

Penny shrugged, not knowing what to say to that. “Who are you? Where am I? What’s going on?”

The man’s eyes were boring into her soul. “Those are excellent questions,” he said, “and, funny enough, the same ones we want to ask you.” He stood up and over here, making her feel even smaller than she already was. At 6’5” and what looked like 250 pounds of sturdy, stocky muscle, he towered over her 5’2”, 120-pound, restrained form. “How does a high schooler get the attention of the great Tony Stark? Who are you to him? What do you do in Stark Industries? What’s going on?”

“I – I don’t know what you’re talking about –” Penny started, but she whimpered when the man brought his steel-toed boot down on her bad ankle. “I’m just his intern! I get coffee for him!”

The man snorted and kicked her ankle, causing her to whimper again. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “Tony Stark doesn’t take just anyone on as his personal intern.” He went outside the box for a moment, and came back with a manila folder with pictures. Mr. Stark with his arm around her shoulders at a party, introducing her to someone. Mr. Stark picking her up from high school. Most damningly, Mr. Stark and her getting food together after they made a breakthrough in the lab.

In all of the photos, she and Mr. Stark were clearly comfortable together, and she was enjoying privileges most interns never got.

“You’re not his intern,” the man said. “You’re his daughter. It was smart of him to try to hide you, but he fucked up big time. And we’re gonna make Daddy Stark pay to get you back.”

Penny felt something constrict in her chest, and she’d been hurt enough times to know it wasn’t a bruised rib. “No, he’s not –” she said desperately. “Mr. Stark isn’t my anything! My father was Richard Parker, he died years ago! Mr. Stark is just my boss!”

The man slapped her across the face, and in a non-enhanced person, it would have broken their jaw and dislodged some teeth. As it was, her teeth cut the inside of her mouth.

“I told you not to lie to me, you little bitch,” he said. “I don’t care what you try to say now. Either Stark pays or he doesn’t. Sooner or later, you won’t be my problem.”

He walked out, and Penny spat the blood out onto the ground next to her. She wanted to spit it in his face, but she also wanted to live.

She stayed in that cell for ages, cold and hungry and aching. Penny was always eating because of the amount of energy she burned, and her body felt like it did when she missed two meals, on the days when she couldn’t eat because she was sick or stressed. She needed extra fuel for her healing factor, so not having food meant her ankle wasn’t getting any better, and the glass prison box didn’t have a cot or a blanket she could curl up on. She just sat on one side of the box, watching her captors as they assembled a computer setup and a staging area.

When they were done, the man from earlier dragged Penny out of the box and to the staging area. They splashed water on her face via a large bucket to make her look (and feel) even more miserable than she already was, and when they started the recording, the man talked a big game about wanting to humble even the Great Tony Stark.

Penny drifted a bit until he pulled her in front of the camera, the operator directly in her face. She could barely breathe at the angle he was holding her at, and he squeezed her neck, making tears form in her eyes.

“You have 24 hours to transfer $30 million into the account we send you, Stark, or your daughter dies,” the man said. “I’d suggest you send it soon.”

With that, the cameras stopped rolling and he dropped her into an ungraceful heap. She landed on her hands, which was enough to break the zip ties, and the man frowned and gestured for someone to re-restrain her.

“You shouldn’t have been able to break those,” he said, looking at her in a new light.

“I didn’t,” she replied, pretending to be in more pain than she was. “Gravity broke the cuffs and the cuffs broke my hands!”

The man shrugged – it would just make it easier to keep her contained if she couldn’t use her hands – and shoved her back in the box. “Sorry, princess,” he grunted, closing the door. “I’ll make sure gravity’s kinder to you next time.”

It was getting late, and she still didn’t have a cot or a blanket. With the water dumped on her, she was still dripping, and the air conditioning in the building made sure her teeth were chattering as she tried to make herself as small as possible to conserve heat. She was wearing a sweater, but she couldn’t pull her arms into it, and her jeans weren’t making this easier.

Somehow she fell into an uneasy sleep, because when she woke up she heard the sounds of doors being blasted off their hinges. Iron Man flew in, with the rest of the Avengers right behind him, and Penny watched as the bad guy’s henchmen were taken out quickly. She broke her own zip ties then, and ripped the door of the glass box clear off its hinges to get out.

Tony finished the last guy off with a repulsor blast and stepped out of his armor, immediately going to hug her. He was clearly worried but relieved, and Penny wanted to cry at how warm his arms were. She was cold and tired and woozy; being at least a full day without a meal was having a major impact on her.

“How are you holding up, Underoos?” he asked, and examined her. Her ankle still wasn’t great, and her shivering was beyond her control.

“I’ve been better, Mr. Stark,” she said, “but these men – they thought I was your daughter.” Penny frowned. “I’m not. I’m just your intern.”

Tony snorted a little and got her to lean on him as they walked out of the warehouse to where the jet was parked. “Trust me, kid, you’re not **just** anything. You know you should use your powers when you get kidnapped, right?”

Penny shrugged. Natasha got her a thick, fluffy towel from somewhere in the jet, and someone passed her a granola bar to munch on until they got back to the Tower. Instantly she felt more human, and she snapped the remains of the zip ties off her own wrists.

“I’ve never been kidnapped before,” she said. “I didn’t have my webshooters, and I didn’t want to give myself away without knowing what was going on. How did I get grabbed, anyway? I can’t remember that part.”

Tony pulled up some footage on the wall as Hawkeye got them in the air. “They got the drop on you as you were leaving the Tower,” he said. “We were making upgrades on your suit, if you can remember that, but it wasn’t ready yet, so you were going to take the subway back home. Your aunt called me when you never made it back for dinner.”

That… made sense, even if Penny still couldn’t connect a memory with watching herself getting tranq’ed by the man and his goons.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” she said, feeling herself start to crash again. It had been a really, really long day. “Wake me up when we get home?”

“Sure thing, Spiderling,” Tony said, and with that Penny closed her eyes and fell back asleep. She felt fingers in her hair, but she couldn’t force her eyes back open. “We got your back.”


	2. In the Hands of the Enemy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 2: Collars

The mission was bad from the moment it started.

Penny, Black Widow, Hawkeye and Captain America were looking into a suspicious office building in the Upper West Side where they’d tracked some HYDRA agents. Intelligence suggested it was minimally guarded, maybe a dozen agents manning it on a daily basis. It should have been easy enough to take them all out.

It was a trap. There were way more than a dozen, and they were packing some serious heat. The team was soon surrounded, and even though Captain America called for backup, they all knew it was going to take some time to arrive. Tony wasn’t on this mission because his armor was damaged in the last fight, Thor was off-world, Bruce was convincing the United Nations to put tighter restrictions on the use of gamma radiation and Falcon was… somewhere, doing something. Penny didn’t really know.

They fought and fought hard. The team tried to rely on Penny as little as possible, since she was still learning the ropes, but her ability to go high mid-fight was a crucial one when they didn’t have Tony, Thor or the Hulk. She was able to take out some of the agents surrounding them and give Hawkeye a chance to get high as well while also making a little more space for Cap and Black Widow to breathe. Cap got surrounded, though, and one Hydra agent managed to put a collar on him that made him scream in agony.

The scream broke everyone else’s focus, and Black Widow was the one they got next. She went down too, choking back her own scream, and Penny swung back into the center of the room to try and defend her downed teammates. Clint was almost running out of arrows, they should have called a retreat, why didn’t they retreat –

One Spider-Girl against half a dozen goons is a moderately fair fight, and Penny would expect to walk away with some injuries if they all ganged up on her at once. Spider-Girl against a dozen goons was less fair, and that’s when she started getting into the serious injuries territory.

Spider-Girl against 20 goons meant she lost. A collar was placed around her neck, and she understood why the others screamed.

The collar took away their powers, and it did so with as much pain as it could.

She, Cap and Nat were all enhanced. Nat wasn’t as enhanced as Penny or Cap, but she had experimental Soviet enhancements to her strength, stamina and flexibility. The only one who wasn’t enhanced – the only one who managed to get somewhere HYDRA couldn’t find him – was Clint, and Penny would bet anything he was in an air duct somewhere, biding his time until backup came.

It would be great if it were any minute now.

The collars were connected to a device one of the agents held, and he pressed a button that brought all three heroes to their knees as their collars delivered pain in the form of an electric shock.

“See how compliant you become?” the commander asked, with a thick Southern drawl. It surprised Penny, because for all that she knew HYDRA recruited from anywhere, she always imagined their top operatives as German. “A press of a button and three heroes fall apart. Once we catch your last friend, we’ll have the whole set from today’s game.”

Penny Parker had never once in her life been able to shut up. “Couldn’t we have played Uno instead? I like it a lot better than this freaky torture thing you’ve got going on here.”

A Hydra agent clocked her clean in the face, and she felt her nose break. Awesome. The blood was now pouring down her face and staining her mask, and she tasted iron on her upper lip.

“We won’t be tolerating any of your chatter tonight, Spider- _Girl_ ,” the commander said, making it clear which part of her identity he found disgusting. “Keep mouthing off, and the next time will be another shock – for you and all your friends. Do you understand?”

She nodded and he smiled, a wicked sight that set her teeth on edge.

“Good.”

The Hydra agents herded them all together. The longer the collar was on her, the more Penny hated it. Before the spider bite, she wasn’t anything to write home about, athletically – she was clumsy, she could barely carry groceries up to her aunt’s third floor apartment and she had asthma. Now, several years later, she had come to regard her strength as an important part of who she was. Being cut off from it made her feel sick and vulnerable.

The commander sent his men to find Clint, but they never did. Of course they didn’t – he wasn’t going to stay in the vents, he found some other safer place to wait for re-enforcement. When the commander’s men came back empty-handed, he got tired of playing hide-and-seek and grabbed Penny roughly. Even with her mask, it was clear to see she had the smallest build of anyone in the group, even against Black Widow. He kicked Penny in the side, and while she was down, used the collar to zap her with a shock.

Penny’s eyes filled with tears, but he couldn’t see under the mask. She grit her teeth and tried to breathe through it, even as her ribs ached and her muscled clenched.

“Trying to play tough, are you?” he said, snarling. “I’m gonna make you scream so hard your teammate hears you and comes running, freak.”

He zapped her again, and this time it was harder to hold back the scream. She didn’t want to break in front of Black Widow and Captain America, but the tears were rolling down her face at this point, and little grunts of pain made it through despite her best efforts.

The commander was not a patient man, and when the zap ended he picked her up by her neck. “You’re not screaming,” he growled. “You should be screaming.”

“She won’t,” said the robotic voice of Iron Man, “but you will.”

The collar took away her extra senses, as well as the heightened part of her other senses, so Penny didn’t hear the Iron Man armor outside office building like she might have otherwise. She was surprised when the commander was hit by a repulsor blast, which caused him to drop her. Penny immediately backed away from him, putting as much distance between him and her as he could, and was overjoyed when she saw Clint, Tony, Scarlet Witch and a few of their other friends storm the building.

The backup squad made quick work of the remaining HYDRA operatives, and then Tony was out of the armor, kneeling in front of Penny with a small laser. “Hold still, kid,” he said. “Let’s get that collar off you.”

She nodded and hugged him when the heavy weight fell off her neck. She could hear Clint doing the same thing for Natasha, and Bucky helping out Steve. Penny’s strength came back to her and she rubbed the area the collar rested on, trying to reassure herself it wasn’t there anymore.

“Thanks for the save,” she said, and stood up, using the Iron Man suit to steady herself.

“No problem, kid,” Tony replied, and they went to rejoin the pack. “Next time you guys take on HYDRA, though, I’m coming with.”

“You won’t hear me arguing against that,” Penny replied as everyone limped back to the QuinJet. Her ribs _hurt_.


	3. My Way or the Highway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 3: Held at Gunpoint

Spider-Girl took unreasonable risks, defying death and gravity with every other swing. She stopped muggings, took down evil magic Nazis who should have learned their lesson in the 40s, and got her butt handed to her by Black Widow in training. Spider-Girl was strong and elastic and determined and powerful.

Penny Parker was just a teenager hanging out with her friends on the weekend after midterms.

They stopped at a convenience store before they were going to see a movie – a lifelike adaption of Jane and the Dragon, a cartoon they’d all watched when they were younger. None of them expected it to be good, but they hoped it would at least be funny. She, Ned and MJ wanted to get soda and candy at the store, and save their extra money for popcorn at the movies.

So when two guys in heavy coats and sunglasses on an overcast summer day got in line behind Penny and her friends, her spider-sense immediately went off. Penny gulped and thought of Uncle Ben, and how her inaction that day left him dead and her and Aunt May with a hole in their life where he used to be.

She wasn’t going to let that happen again.

Calling 911 on her phone, she took as much time paying for her snacks and drinks as she could. Her phone wasn’t on mute, though, so when 911 picked up, both would-be robbers could hear it.

Penny felt a gun on the back of her shoulder and heard Ned start freaking out. MJ tried to get the man’s gun off her, but his partner used his gun to whip MJ in the face, making her fall back into Ned.

“You little bitch,” the first gunman said, the weapon digging into Penny’s light pink jacket. “You just had to play the fucking hero, huh?”

The store owner had his hands up, and when Penny raised her eyes to look at him, it was clear he was terrified. Poor Mr. Delmar. “You can take whatever you want,” Mr. Delmar said, “anything. Please, though, don’t hurt anyone.”

Penny wasn’t wearing the Spider-Suit under her clothing, but even if she had, it wouldn’t have absorbed a bullet fired from a .45 at point-blank range. The 911 operator had already sent a dispatch to their location, but that was at least a few minutes away.

“Come on, let’s just go,” the second gunman said. “I don’t wanna still be here when the cops get here.”

The first gunman grumbled and pushed Penny against the counter, the gun still in her back. “Give us everything in the cash register,” he said, “or I blow her fucking brains out.”

Mr. Delmar quickly opened the register and started emptying the money out, but Penny hated it. Mr. Delmar was a good man, and he didn’t deserve this. Thinking quickly, she bucked backwards, hitting the man in the nose with the back of her head.

It gave her one hell of a headache, but he stumbled backwards, the gun falling out of his hand. The second gunman weighed his options and ran out of the store less than a minute before NYPD ran in. As soon as they had the first gunman secured, Mr. Delmar ran out from behind the counter and gave Penny a hug.

“I can’t believe you did that!” he shouted, feeling her back to make sure she was okay. “I have – I have insurance. Cash can always be replaced. People can’t.”

Penny hugged him back, grateful that he didn’t get hurt either. “I know,” she said, “but I couldn’t just stand there and do nothing. They hurt MJ!”

“Hey, leave me out of this,” she said. “I like to draw people in crisis, not join them.”

The police took their statements, theirs and Mr. Delmar’s, and he tried to give Penny her drinks and candy for free, but she slipped what she would have paid for them in his tip jar before she left. She didn’t want to short him on cash when he’d only just finished rebuilding from when the jackasses robbing the ATM sliced his store in half.

After they left, Penny’s phone rang again, and she answered the call before looking at the ID.

“Penny, why did you call 911 10 minutes ago?” Tony asked, clearly concerned. “Everything okay, kiddo? Karen says you’re not in the suit.”

“It’s nothing,” Penny said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow, okay? Right now I’m about to go watch a movie.”


	4. Running Out of Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 4: Collapsed Building
> 
> (tw: claustrophobia)

Penny’s claustrophobia started the night she beat Toomes.

She couldn’t not be claustrophobic after that. Small, tight spaces reminded her of being trapped under tons of steel and concrete after someone who was meaner and more experienced took her down. She would hyperventilate at the reminder but moving her arms – moving at all – helped a lot. It kept her from being buried too far in the memories, and now the only times she really suffered were when she got twisted up in blankets during a nightmare.

Now, though – now she was panicking.

She and Scarlet Witch were helping the Avengers fight off an alien portal the Fantastic Four opened (thanks, Dr. Richards) when a building went down on top of them. They were in a parking garage, and while Wanda had tried to protect them as best she could, her powers could only do so much.

When Penny woke up, she and Wanda were trapped underneath the wreckage, and the Avengers were screaming in her ear. No, wait, that was the comm. Penny blinked, realizing where she was, and there was a terrified edge to her voice when she answered the group.

“Guys, we need some superheroics here,” she said, trying to keep from going into a full panic on the line. “Witch and I are trapped. She’s –” Penny had Karen shine a light from the eyes of the mask, “she’s passed out, and bleeding from her head. Wait, maybe her nose? I can’t tell. We couldn’t get out of the parking garage before it came down.”

“Is she breathing?” Steve asked, sounding out of breath. “We’re not doing so well out here. Even with all of our heaviest hitters in play we’re just managing to contain them.”

Penny wanted to remind him that she was stronger than him, that she was faster and nimbler and just as capable as he was, that she went toe-to-toe with him at Germany and in training sessions, and that Wanda was even better than Penny was. That two of their heaviest hitters were buried under 20 tons of rubble… but now wasn’t the time. “Wanda’s breathing,” Penny said, trying to focus. “Her pulse could be better, but our biggest concern is being crushed.”

“Then you’ll have to take a backseat for the moment,” Tony replied, cursing as something exploded near him. “I’m sorry, Spidey, but we can’t come pick you up yet.”

Penny felt everything in her sink when she heard that. “O – okay,” she said shakily, trying to avoid crying as she got off the line. It was going to be okay. It was going to be okay.

It wasn’t okay.

Karen warned her that she was hyperventilating, that she was likely to pass out if she kept doing this, but Penny couldn’t control it. She could barely move her arms, much less push anything off of them. It was just like the last time. Even though she had her suit, there was no one coming to save her.

No one was coming to save her.

No one was coming to save _them_.

Wanda stirred next to Penny, and Penny distantly heard Wanda try to move. “Pen-ny?” Wanda asked uncertainly. “Where are we?”

“Trapped,” Penny whispered, trying to twist so she could see Wanda better. “Wanda, the Avengers can’t come get us. This is really bad.”

Wanda frowned and tried to use her powers. A little bit of red mist came from her fingers, but it didn’t get far before she cried out in pain and grabbed her head. “I can’t –” she cried out. “I can’t. My head. It hurts.”

Penny mostly just felt sick, but caring about Wanda distracted her from being afraid. Well, more afraid. “Are you bleeding anywhere?” Penny asked.

Wanda tried to move her leg from under some rubble, but that seemed to just make it worse. She cried out and reached for Penny’s hand, squeezing it. “I can’t move,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happened to my leg. I can feel it and it hurts, but I can’t move it.”

That could mean the leg was getting crushed (no bueno), that it was broken (no bueno, but less no bueno) or that something else was wrong (still no bueno). Penny considered their options and stared down at her hands.

“I don’t think we can stay down here much longer,” she said, her breathing almost back to normal. “I’m gonna try to get us out.”

Admitting it out loud made Penny feel like she was about to choke, but she really didn’t think they could stay down there. She was barely not getting crushed, and if Wanda’s leg _was_ getting crushed, the longer it was under pressure the worse off it would be. Penny didn’t think she could live with herself if Wanda needed an amputation because she was scared.

“Let me know if anything changes,” she said, and started to push their way out.

It was hard. She could barely move her arms, which meant she couldn’t build up the momentum she wanted to get things to move faster. And, even worse, once she pushed one hunk of steel-reinforced concrete out of the way, another slid into the first one’s place. It was dangerous, taxing work, and Penny was light-headed and terrified the entire time.

She pushed chunk after chunk after chunk of concrete. Her hands bled as the rocks tore up the material that made up her gloves. She kept pushing.

“Penny, I think you’ve almost got it,” Wanda said, panting heavily.

There was a little more room in the space they were in, and Penny went back to Wanda to see how she was. There was a fine layer of sweat creating a path through the dust, and Penny went to see if she could push some of the rocks covering Wanda out of the way.

She got two or three cleared when even more shifted into place. Wanda cried out and passed out again, overwhelmed by the pain, and Penny cursed before reconnecting with the comms.

“Guys, we really need help down here,” Penny panted, sitting on the ground next to Wanda. “Witch is in a bad way, and every time I try to dig us out of this I think I’m making it worse.”

“We turned the tide of the battle,” Cap responded, “but we haven’t won yet. Stay down, Spider-Girl.”

Penny turned off her comm again and wanted to scream. What good were her teammates if they couldn’t help one of their fallen? If it had just been Penny, she could have understood, but Wanda was hurt. Wanda needed help.

Help she couldn’t wait on.

Penny created a web barrier for the two of them. There were two large slabs of concrete that were jutting up around them, with a third chunk balanced on the two, acting as a roof. Attaching a web to the different portions of concrete, Penny used her webbing as a net, to try and catch any debris that might fall on them.

Then she got back to work.

Penny’s goal was to mostly try and liberate Wanda’s legs, if she could. They could stay under the rubble as long as they needed to once her legs were free. Her fingers and knuckles were almost slippery with blood now, but it didn’t matter if she could free Wanda.

Penny wasn’t thinking clearly. She knew that. But she also knew no one was coming to save them – at least, not in any sort of time. So it was up to her to save herself, again, and also her best superhero friend.

She was able to clear enough room to see that Wanda’s ankle was broken. Badly broken, like, was never meant to be twisted that way broken. Penny pulled Wanda into the little space they had, and then tried to re-evaluate their options. How much time passed?

She hopped back into the comms. “Okay, team, please tell me you’re coming for us. Witch’s ankle is completely shattered, she’s passed out from the pain and I’m not doing so hot in here myself.”

Natasha came on the lines then, her voice almost regretful. “We’re almost done, little spider. I know, it’s been a long time, but there was too much going on. We’ll pick you guys up soon.”

“Wanda can’t wait that long,” Penny said, “and neither can I. Come get us or not, but I’m going to lose my mind down here if I just have to wait.”

“Be careful,” Natasha said, and grunted. “We’re not in much better shape ourselves.”

Penny felt a pang of anxiety and a little bit of guilt. She’d been out more than half the fight because of being trapped here, watching Wanda suffer. She needed out. She needed out. She needed out. They needed out.

She pushed a few more slabs of concrete away from them, desperate to see some form of natural light, and the desperation drove her when she didn’t have any more energy left in her. At that point, it was less of a conscious decision to get out and more of a primal need.

Sounds of the outside world filtered back in as she got closer and closer to being free, and with one last, mighty shove she created an opening she could crawl through. It wasn’t really good enough for her to get Wanda out of, but she made it work, dragging her friend’s (still unconscious) body out of the wreckage behind her.

Penny heard something as she got free, got Wanda free, and she had enough time to look up as an alien took aim at her. He shot, and in her exhausted state, she couldn’t even move herself to dodge.

She fell on Wanda and they tumbled down the broken concrete slope. Penny hit her head, her back, her arms, her ribs and her hips during the fall, and at the bottom, her only thought was ‘Ow’ before she passed out, too.

Several hours later, Penny woke up to a familiar sight: the MedBay. She was hooked up to a heart monitor, and there’s a bunch of white bandages on her everything, including her chest. Blinking, she saw Natasha sitting next to her bed, as well as Wanda on the other side.

“Yay,” she croaked, her throat terribly dry. “We didn’t die.”

Natasha and Wanda both were also hurt. Natasha’s arm was in a sling, and there’s a thick gauze pad on her forehead, just over her left eye. Wanda’s also taped up, but hers was a butterfly bandage over her temple.

“No, we didn’t,” Wanda agreed, smiling. “You pulled us out of there. You saved us.”

“I feel like I got used for target practice,” Penny said. She adjusts her bed so she could sit up without having to actually move, and it helped her feel more in control. “You guys managed to eventually get there?”

Natasha’s mouth folded into a line, and there’s a look in her eyes that says she’s not happy about how the mission went. “We did,” she said. “We should have been there sooner.”

“Yes, you should have,” Wanda agreed. “The doctors said without Penny, I might not be able to use this foot again. I like my foot. I want to keep it.”

As Wanda talks, an overwhelming sense of exhaustion swept over Penny. “That’s the second time I’ve had to crawl out from under a building,” she said, tears prickling her eyes. “I don’t think I can do a third. I didn’t think I could do this one. I – “

Natasha and Wanda both hold her, but in different ways. Wanda had her hands on Penny’s, squeezing her hand, letting her know she understands. She remembered how scared Penny was, and she knows how much it took to dig herself out of the rubble again.

Natasha had her hand on Penny’s arm. She gave it a firm squeeze and stands up. Natasha isn’t good at this bedside manner, watching and waiting and consoling. She’s good at kicking peoples’ asses, and she needs to go kick Steve and Tony’s.

After she leaves, Penny invited Wanda into the bed and asks Wanda to hold her. It’s been a long, hard day, she had to face a very traumatic fear, and her teammates – her heroes – let her down in the worst way possible.

Wanda understood, and she kept guard at Penny’s side, even threatening the team’s leaders with her powers when they came to see Penny, to check on her. Apologize to her.

Penny deserved more than this, and Wanda will stay by her side to make sure she gets it.


	5. Where Do You Think You're Going?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Failed Escape/Rescue

Penny had been trying to escape for multiple days.

She was captured by Toomes, who got out of prison during a massive prison break that she’d spent the better part of a week cleaning up. He knew that, and he waited until she was exhausted and sloppy before he kidnapped her, taking her down almost as easily as he had that day he collapsed a building on top of her.

Penny didn’t know the limits of her strength, but he managed to find something that would hold her. The cuffs keeping her attached to the wall had her locked there, and even her most desperate attempts couldn’t budge them.

Once he had her, the Vulture didn’t spend much time around her. Someone in a mask brought her food and water twice a day, which was far less than she needed, so Penny was kept weak and hungry and disoriented. There was a small toilet and a small cot within reach, even with the cuffs, and she tried to stay strong even as her muscles twinged from disuse. Penny was a tactile person, and being forced to stay on the ground and in one place for so long was driving her mad.

After what must have been days, Toomes came to see her himself. He stooped down to her level, his eyes boring into hers, and Penny felt acutely aware that she was powerless in this situation. She’d stopped his plans, sent him to prison, made him face consequences including the breaking of his family. There was no way he held any mercy in his heart for her.

Toomes laughed at her predicament. “Not such a strong young woman now, are you?” he asked, delighting in her chains. “See, I’m not smart enough to make stuff like this, but I’m not the only one you angered when you did this. Lot of my boys didn’t have that stable income they relied on once their boss was in prison. Lot of families went hungry because of you.”

“Because of you!” Penny yelled back. “Because of you and them and all of the choices you all have made. Your weapons were too dangerous to be on the streets. I stopped you from turning my city into a war zone.”

Toomes scoffed. “Kid, your streets?” He grabbed her chin, forcing her to look at him. “Your streets were already a war zone. We didn’t create the customer base; they came to us looking for new toys to take out their own competition.” He released her roughly, and Penny had to keep herself from spitting in his face. “And why shouldn’t they? Your precious Mr. Stark has weapons, the government has weapons – hell, I bet you do too. Is it only wrong for ‘other people’ to arm themselves?”

He signaled to the guard and had her food brought in but made sure the guard left it inches beyond where Penny could reach. Toomes laughed and pushed it even farther away from her.

“You’re a clever girl,” he said, laughing as he got up and left. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

If Penny had her webs, she would have, but the alien tech that was keeping her captive was also frying Karen. Penny couldn’t signal out of wherever she was, and she couldn’t make the dinner come any closer to her, so for the rest of the night she smelled chicken and carrots achingly close by as she tried to sleep off her stabbing hunger pains.

It must have been a week like that. Penny was long past stinking to her own nose, but she had to reek to some of the guards as well. She could feel on her own body that she had lost weight, and not just the baby fat that still clung to her cheeks, despite the sheer amount of exercise she did on a daily basis. Finally, Toomes came to see her again, and he brought a device with him to keep her restrained as he took her to another location.

Well, she wasn’t having any of that. A week of silence and hunger and little sleep made her desperate. During the hair’s breadth of a window, she broke his hold on her, and took him down with a solid punch to the face. The other guard near her cell were next, and even though she got them both, one got a solid hit to her side with a baton. Another got a shot off and it grazed her hip, making it even harder for her to walk after a week of limited movement.

Penny managed to bust out a window, but when she did, she didn’t recognize where she was. It smelled like New York City, but it wasn’t Queens or Manhattan – maybe the Bronx? She spent less time hanging around there. Wherever she was, she was away from the cuffs, so at least she could get Karen up and running again. Hurting and dizzy, Penny limped her way to a mostly-covered space between two storage sheds on an apartment building roof and found the emergency reboot button Mr. Stark put above her ear.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be that easy. As the system was rebooting, Penny heard the sounds of the Vulture wingset powering up, and she curled deeper into her hiding place to buy herself at least a little longer. The moment she was online again, Mr. Stark would be able to track her, and then she would be okay. He would come get her.

She didn’t get that moment. What Penny didn’t realize was that her bullet wound left a blood trail, and it led her captors right back to her. Just as Karen greeted her, Penny’s spider sense went off, and the sheds exploded around her.

They’d found her.

Penny still didn’t have functioning web shooters, which meant she didn’t have a way to protect or defend herself. She didn’t even have the means to swing away from the attack and towards the Avengers Tower, which was too far away for her to be able to see. Penny covered her head as splintered wood rained and metal debris rained down on her and tried to figure a way out of her situation.

She couldn’t hide here forever – in fact, she heard a weapon powering up to blast the pile of debris she was buried in.

The blast never came.

Penny poked her head out of the rubble and saw Mr. Stark there, in full Iron Man armor, with a couple of Avengers beside him. Black Widow saw Penny and pulled her out of the wreckage, noticing her wounds and how hard it was for her to move.

“Guys, I have Penny and she’s been wounded,” Widow said, getting Penny to lean on her. “Hard to tell, but at least one gunshot wound to the hip, a couple of shrapnel wounds and she’s way too light compared to her normal. Heading to the jet.”

Penny heard Cap acknowledge it through Widow’s earbuds, and together they got her to where the jet was, parked in a baseball field a few blocks away. Penny all but collapsed when Widow let her sit, and Widow quickly started getting medical supplies to treat some of her injuries.

“Your dad has been worried sick, Penny,” Widow said, and she pressed the spider on Penny’s suit. The fabric came away easily, and Widow frowned at the collection of bruises – as well as how easily she could see Penny’s ribs. She started cleaning and patching some of Penny’s wounds carefully, and she was almost done when the rest of the Avengers came back.

Tony immediately de-armored when he saw Penny, and she ran into his arms, hugging her mentor as tightly as she could without hurting him. Tony returned the hug with equal desperation.

“You’re safe now, ‘Roos,” he said, his arms coming up to cradle her head against his chest. “We got him. You’re gonna be okay.”


	6. Please

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stop, please

Penny had never seen Mr. Stark this angry, not with her.

They were on a group mission with the Avengers, and Penny took a bad risk. Instead of staying where she was supposed to, she crept along the wall and tried to surprise some of the bad guys, take them out before they could cause more problems.

The first two she’d taken out like that were easy. Sneak up from behind them and web them to a wall, taking them out of the battle. The third minion, though, had been waiting for her, and so when Penny tried to web him up she got a chest full of plasma cannon.

Her suit protected her from the worst of the blast, but the sound alerted everyone else – both Avengers and bad guys – to what was going on. The strategy the Avengers were working under was ruined, and a couple of other Avengers were hurt in the fray. Clint broke an arm defending himself, and one of the minions took out Sam’s wings while he was flying, which meant internal injuries and a broken leg while he was recovering.

Both heroes would be out of commission for a while as they healed, even with the best medical technology in the world at their fingertips.

Captain America had come to personally debrief her when she woke up. He explained to Penny how her going off on her own had caused a cascade effect, and because of her actions, they hadn’t accomplished their goals. They were going to have to spend months more tracking the group and try again in the future, because SHIELD already checked and the group had disappeared.

The mission wasn’t a total bust. The plasma cannon wasn’t technology the group they were tracking should have had, and it opened up new avenues they had to look into. If the cartel were expanding out of traditional warfare and into enhanced tech, it was something they needed to know about. Additionally, while the fight was going on, the group was so distracted that Natasha was able to gather information from their servers without being detected.

All of that being said, though, Captain America was disappointed in her. They were going to be going over mission rules and tactics when she was out of MedBay, and that was going to be soon – Penny healed fast.

As much as Cap was disappointed, though – Tony was pissed.

“You were reckless!” he yelled, after Dr. Cho released her back to her quarters. Tony was waiting there, and it was obvious from how he held himself that he was failing at holding anything back. “You could have gotten yourself killed by such a stunt! You nearly got others killed after you screwed the pooch! How could you?!?”

Penny had only just woken up a half hour earlier, and her chest still ached, healing the rest of the damage the plasma cannon did. “I was trying to make it easier for us. If those guards saw us –”

“Then you were supposed to defend yourself and let everyone else know,” Tony finished, “not go looking for a fight! Did you almost get yourself and everyone else killed because you got bored, kid? Is that what this is?”

Penny’s eyes pricked with tears. “Of course not! I just thought I could help –”

“And what a great job you did, Parker,” Tony barked, in a tone she hadn’t hurt since she was 15 and just starting out. She’d been working with Tony for years, but she was still new to the Avengers and to the concept of working with a team. “You really helped the team today. This – this can never happen again.”

With each word, Penny felt the urge to cry get more and more powerful. All she had been doing was try to make the mission easier, and instead she’d made everything so much worse. Penny buried her head in her arms, trying to block out the sounds of Tony tearing her a new one and hide the tears that were starting to fall.

“Stop, please,” Penny said. “I get it. I screwed up. I screwed up bad. Cap already talked to me about it.”

Tony snorted, but he didn’t press it any farther. For a few seconds, Penny didn’t know what he was going to do, but she heard him sigh and sit down on the bed with her.

“When we give you a role, we mean it,” he said. “This was supposed to be covert. I saw the first two goons you brought down, and you weren’t entirely wrong. They were too close. But you pressed your luck and you got whammied.”

Tony wrapped an arm around her and pulled her into his chest. Penny, who was starting to sob, held onto it as tightly as she dared without hurting him.

“Next time you get an idea like that, check with us before you go off on your own,” Tony told her, squeezing her shoulder gently. “If we don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, it can create serious issues on the mission. We won’t be able to help unless we know where you are, and you won’t be able to help us if we need your support.”

Penny nodded miserably against him, and Tony went from rubbing her shoulder to rubbing her back. Sometimes it was so easy to forget she was 19, the way she picked up cars and took down villains and protected the city, but other times (like now) it was so, so obvious how young she was.

They sat there in silence for a bit as she cried herself out. When she was done, he tucked her in and left her alone for a little bit, eager to find something technological to mess with to get his mind off the bad mission and the injuries – both Penny’s and the others’.

Sam needed a new flight system after his got wrecked during the fight. Maybe Tony would start there.


	7. I've Got You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tw: vomiting

“I’ve got you,” Penny heard someone whisper, and felt a stab of pain as they moved. But… she wasn’t moving. She was being carried! Penny looked up and saw Captain Rogers carrying her, and her mind searched for clues why she was hurt and why Captain Rogers was carrying her.

“Sir?” she asked, and cringed as she felt her injured side throb. “What… what happened?”

“Stark’s armor was compromised,” the Captain explained. “I still don’t know all of it, but he screamed for all of us to get out. You didn’t want to leave him, but you got hit by pieces of the armor exploding and you went down hard.”

Penny felt acid climb up her throat and she rolled out of the Captain’s arms so she could lose her lunch on the ground instead of on him. The Captain frowned and kneeled down beside her, and they were both weakly relieved to see there wasn’t any blood in her vomit.

“Take it easy,” Captain Rogers said, rubbing her back. “We have to meet up with the others before we can do anything else.”

She shook her head and threw up again. “We have to go back for him,” she said, wiping her mouth on her suit. “If he got hurt… if there’s something wrong with his suit… he could be in trouble.”

“I dunno if you noticed, but we’re in trouble,” Rogers replied. “You might have hit your head – or something may have hit it for you. Nausea is a symptom of concussions and I haven’t been able to check your eyes or your head because of your mask. We get to the others, we get you help and then we go back.”

The last part was said in his Captain voice. Penny knew better than to go against him when he used his Captain voice. She let herself be picked up again, and he ran them to the rendezvous point, where Sam started looking at her injuries.

“Falcon, if you get her back to the jet everyone else can come with me and see what happened to Stark,” Rogers said, and Penny almost protested. Then the Captain handed her to Sam and even the change of who was holding her made her dizzy.

She curled up in Sam’s arms, and he got her back to the jet. There was shrapnel in her wound that he didn’t want to touch, so he cleaned the area as best he could and covered it with gauze and tape. “This should hold you until we get back to the Compound,” he said, and she ripped her mask off, groaning at the pain in her side and in her head. “And looks like Cap was right about that concussion. You’ve got at least a moderate one.”

Penny let out a frustrated breath. “I should be out there with them,” she said. “I should be helping find Mr. Stark.”

Sam shook his head and examined her for any more injuries. “No, you’re down. Stay down and let the others handle this. Stark would want your ass here, getting checked out, and he would kill us if we let you go back out there knowing you had shrapnel in your side and a banged-up head.”

Penny frowned, but she couldn’t say he was wrong. Just as Sam was concluding that he’d found the most important injuries, though, an alert from Captain Rogers came over both of their comms. “We have Stark, but he’s not doing well!” the Captain said. “Be ready to take care of him. We’ll be there in two minutes.”

Penny scooted out of the way, worried as could be, and gasped when the doors opened and Mr. Stark was brought in. There was so much blood, and half of the armor was just gone. Black Widow got up front to start the jet back up and Penny stood there frozen just staring at her mentor’s body.

“Penny,” the Captain said, and then again, firmer. “Penny, you have to move and let Sam do his job.”

Penny couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. There were streams of hot tears running down her face, and recognizing that she was too caught up in the image to listen, Rogers pulled her aside and got her buckled in next to him.

“Hey,” he said, tearing her eyes away from Sam working desperately on her father-figure. “He’s a fighter, just like the rest of us. He’s gone through worse and survived. Don’t write him off just yet.”

Penny nodded and swallowed roughly. “He’s done so much for me… if I could have helped him – and he didn’t – I –”

She was crying, and Rogers put an arm around her. For all that Penny was becoming better and better at this, for all that she had three years of fighting with the Avengers, there were still things that could shake her – shake all of them.

Penny was one of the loudest, most tactile members of the team. She would hug people for bringing her food, take a nap on someone at movie night, nudge someone if she was telling a really bad joke. She almost always gave up her element of surprise to quip at someone she was about to take down. She let it be known when Nat or Cap kicked her ass a little too hard in training.

So the fact that she was silent the entire flight home, focuses only on the ragged rise and fall of Tony’s chest, underscored just how much the man meant to her.

Tony was the first one to deplane, and Penny would have stood there shell-shocked, except she was also on the wounded list and needed to be taken care of. Steve picked her up again and put her in MedBay, where she got a clear view of what was happening to Tony until they rushed him in for surgery.

The rest of the day was a blur to her, but she remembered the weight and the warmth of the Captain’s hand on her shoulder.

“We’ve got you, Penny,” he said. “I’ve got you.”


	8. Where Did Everybody Go?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Abandoned
> 
> tw: abandonment issues

Penny kept losing people.

First, it was her parents when she was only 6. One day they left on a business trip and never came home.

Then it was her uncle, in her arms, while she was screaming and begging for him to stay with her until the ambulance got there. All of the pleading in the world wouldn’t have worked; her request was far beyond either of their ability to grant.

Then Mr. Stark seemed to step into and then out of her life the moment he was disappointed in her. They made up after the Homecoming incident, but watching him take her suit and go made her so much more wary of him after he came back.

The sum of these experiences meant she was left with a handful of friends, Aunt May and a lot of trust and abandonment issues.

And now, it looked like those issues were about to get even worse.

Penny was spending the weekend at the Avengers Tower because Aunt May was out of state for a friend’s wedding. She went to go on patrol, and when she got back a few hours later, the entire living area was dark. Quiet.

“Speak to me, FRI,” Penny said, stripping out of her suit as she went for the arnica she knew was in the first aid kit. “Where is everyone? Don’t we usually have a special team dinner on Friday nights?”

“The team went to dinner early,” FRIDAY responded.

Penny blinked and tried to focus her breathing. “When did they leave?” Penny asked. “Do you know where they went?”

“Tony booked a place in advance a few weeks ago, at La Mystique,” FRIDAY said. “It’s a very exclusive restaurant, and it only serves people who are over 18.”

Oh. _Oh._

Well, that stung. To think that she was considering so little by her teammates that not only did they forget to invite her, they went to a place where she never would have been let in…

There was a part of her brain that told her that rationally, this was probably decided well before Aunt May asked Mr. Stark if she could stay over, and that they never meant to exclude her, but the larger part of her couldn’t ignore that they organized an entire team dinner at a place where she couldn’t go. That they had created this dinner without ever intending to invite her.

And, of course, it wasn’t everyone. Clint was home with his family, and so as Scott. Wanda and Vision were helping with Sovokian rebuilding efforts, and Rhodey was in Washington with Sam. Thor was off-world. The only Avengers at the Tower right now were Captain Rogers, Mr. Stark, Black Widow and Bruce Banner.

Penny found her jacket and her shoes and decided that being in the Tower would be too painful for her. Aunt May had given her a little money for food, and Penny decided to find a street vendor and get a giant plate of something and eat her feelings.

And it worked, for an hour or two, but soon enough she was full (or as full as she wanted to be) and she was still hurting.

She didn’t have her suit on her, and really, this would have been a terrible time for Penny to go patrolling. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Penny had been out on nights where she felt like tonight, and it usually meant lots of bruises and at least one stab wound.

Instead, she hopped in a subway and started riding all the way to the top of The Bronx.

She didn’t come up here a lot. She was a Queens girl at home, but going to high school in Midtown meant she got real familiar with the subway system in the early morning. Still, that meant she was going between Queens and Manhattan. The last time she came to The Bronx, it was several years ago and on a field trip.

Penny had her headphones in, blocking out some of the noise of being on the subway, and she had her emo playlist in. In this place, she wasn’t a superhero or a girl genius or an orphan. She was just a New Yorker riding the subway.

When she reached the end of the line, she got out, walked around for a bit and checked her phone. Nothing. No messages, no texts, no worried voicemails about where she was at almost midnight. Of course, her curfew was 2 am, so it was possible they didn’t notice anything too out of the ordinary yet.

Penny grabbed one more snack and hopped on the next train back to Manhattan with a heavy heart. Of course she was always going to get forgotten. Of course she would be left out.

When she came home, the Tower was still quiet. Penny tried to console herself that it was only for people who were full-time Avengers, for people who accepted the invitation the first time it was given to them, but it didn’t matter. She still curled up in her room, hugging her pillow, crying her eyes out over being abandoned again by the coolest group of people on Earth.

She woke up the next morning to the smell of homemade bacon, eggs, waffles, muffins and coffee. As soon as the adult Avengers realized she was stumbling out of her room, they started apologizing.

“I’m sorry, Underoos,” Tony said. “I totally forgot you were coming over after patrol this weekend until FRIDAY told me you were in your room. I would have brought you along if I remembered.”

Penny blushed and looked away. Now that her deepest fears about her lack of a place on the team had been confirmed, she really didn’t want to talk to anyone about why it stung so much. “I get it. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Captain Rogers said. “It’s not, and we should have remembered you were coming over.”

“You get to pick where we go next time,” Natasha offered, and Penny shrugged.

“It’s really not that big of a deal,” Penny said. “I was out patrolling, and then after I just walked around and I got some food from a vendor. I was barely here to notice.”

And that wasn’t technically a lie, so Karen couldn’t rat her out on it.

“If you say so, Penny,” Dr. Banner said, and she nodded, trying to plaster a smile on through a full plate of eggs.

Penny knew Natasha knew better – hell, Mr. Stark probably knew better – but the group let the subject slide, and then Mr. Stark was talking about international relations and how The Avengers needed to work better with foreign governments during and after disasters and Penny mostly tuned them out.

She would find her place in the world eventually. It just really, really hurt that it didn’t seem like her place was here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a comment if you like this! I've posted eight chapters now and I've gotten bookmarks and kudos but no comments, and that's kinda hard on me. I'd love to hear what you guys think!


	9. For the Greater Good

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Take me instead!"

Penny loved hanging out with her little sister.

It was one of the best things about the Snap, honestly. So much was different and so much was wrong but when Penny was finished getting patched up after the final battle, after getting the Gauntlet to Carol, she was introduced to Morgan, and they instantly clicked.

Penny had always wanted a younger sister, but her parents died when she was still young, and Ben couldn’t have kids because of an illness when he was younger. Morgan had grown up hearing stories about her older sister Penny, Spider-Woman, who worked with their dad and fought bad guys and saved people.

So Penny focused on getting to know and love Morgan as a bright spot when everything else was up in the air. It was easy to love her, and easier to impress her. Everything was magical, like going to feed ducks at the park (and eating some of the grapes they brought) or getting ice cream.

Penny wanted everything to be magical for Morgan.

So when three armed gunmen came into the playground where Penny was pushing Morgan’s swing, Penny’s hero senses flipped into full gear. She stopped Morgan’s swing and pulled the little girl into her arms before hitting the emergency button on her watch.

The gunmen clearly knew what they were doing and who they were here for. They went straight for Penny and Morgan, and Penny put Morgan down and put herself in front of Morgan.

“Give us the Stark brat,” the lead gunman spat, “and you might get to walk away from here.”

Penny shook her head. “Take me instead,” she offered. “I’ll be less of a hassle as a hostage. She’s just a little girl, she’s going to need you to take care of her. She’s going to cry and scream and need to go to the bathroom a lot. I’m almost 18.”

The lead gunman laughed. “We’re here for Stark’s kid, not his babysitter. Get out of the way or the kid will be wearing your brains when she sees Daddy again.”

Penny stood her ground. No matter what happened, she needed to protect Morgan, and above all else she needed to buy them time for someone else to get there. The emergency buttons should have sent out an alert to all of the Avengers, and if she remembered right, Uncle Rhodey was in the Tower with Mr. Stark this week.

“Dad doesn’t just let Morgan go with anyone,” Penny said, the name feeling unfamiliar in her mouth. He was still ‘Mr. Stark’ to her, even after helping save the universe together. “I’m his daughter too. I was born before he got married to Pepper. He keeps me a secret because I’m not legitimate.”

Penny watched the information spin in the gunmen’s brains.

“We take them both,” the lead gunman decided, and Penny’s mouth went dry.

“No! Me for her,” she said, heat in her voice. “Take me, not her!”

The gunmen surrounded them and Penny knew they were out of time. They took Penny’s phone and threw it on the ground before shooting it, and then they marched the two of them into an unmarked white van. Morgan was crying the entire way, and Penny was holding onto her, trying to comfort her as much as she could.

They were still traveling to wherever the bad guys were taking them when there was a thunk on the roof of the van. Since it was cold, both Morgan and Penny were wearing long-sleeved coats, and the sleeves hid the StarkBands they both wore.

Mr. Stark was there, and he was going to take them home.

Penny threw herself over Morgan as the gunmen started firing up. The driver jerked the van around, trying to shake Tony off the roof, and Penny was thrown against the side of the van, still curled around Morgan. Morgan was screaming and Penny started punching out a window to get them out of the contained space.

The window shattered easily and Penny crawled out of the vehicle, ditching her shoes so she could cling to the vehicle better. There was feeling of something warm and wet near her midsection, where she was holding Morgan, but Penny couldn’t afford to check – they weren’t out of danger. She crawled to the top of the roof and saw both Iron Man and War Machine (Uncle Rhodey was always War Machine to her, even if he was called Iron Patriot now) trying to take down the bad guys.

“MR. STARK!” Penny screamed, and that got his attention. “Get Morgan out of here!”

“I can finish this up,” War Machine said, and Iron Man nodded before grabbing them both. He flew and carried them both to a nearby rooftop as the van crashed into a nearby fence.

Morgan ran to her father the moment the Iron Man suit opened, crying into his legs. Mr. Stark picked her up and held her close before he walked over to Penny, who was still trying to catch her breath.

“You okay there, kiddo?” he asked, his face full of concern.

Penny nodded, but she was crying too. She stood up to hug him but folded over as soon as the pain caught up to her.

She’d been shot in the waist.

Mr. Stark’s face went pale and he immediately got back in the Iron Man armor. “Come on, Morgan, you gotta hold tight to Daddy,” he said, scooping them both up again. “You both have been so, so brave, but we need to take one more trip to get you both back to the Tower. Pen, keep pressure on that wound.”

Penny grunted, which was as close to a ‘yes sir’ as anyone was going to get. He blasted off with both of them, warning MedBay that Penny was injured, and touched down on the launchpad as a stretcher came out for her.

“You’re going to be fine, honey,” he said, and set Morgan down for a minute while he stepped out of the Iron Man suit. Penny, who had been shot before, nodded and squeezed his hand before she was rolled inside for surgery to get the bullet and any fragments out.

When she woke up later that afternoon, Morgan was napping on Penny’s non-injured side and Mr. Stark was sitting in a chair by her bedside.

He put down the tablet he’d been working on when he heard Penny wake up.

“You did so good out there today,” he said, squeezing her arm gently. “Morgan told me all about it. She said you tried to exchange yourself for her.”

Penny’s throat felt sore and dry, and Mr. Stark gave her a cup of ice chips so she could wet her mouth without worrying about drinking too much so soon after surgery.

“She’s a little kid,” Penny said. “I’m a superhero. I can deal with things a lot better than she can.”

Mr. Stark nodded. “I get it,” he said. “You did everything you were supposed to. You hit the emergency button and you protected your little sister with everything you had. I’m so, so proud of you.”

And then the thing Penny never expected happened. Mr. Stark gently pulled her into a firm hug. He kissed the top of her head, and it was so much like what Aunt May did, what Uncle Ben used to do that Penny leaned into it out of habit.

“Just remember,” Mr. Stark said. “You’re my kid too. I know you’re going to get hurt. I brought you into some of those battles myself. You did so, so well today, and I don’t want you to think otherwise. But I want you both safe, whenever possible. Understand?”

Tears streamed down Penny’s face, and she nodded into his shoulder.

“I get it, Dad.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who commented! This chapter was directly inspired by some of the comments I've already received. If you want to see any other ideas, feel free to let me know!


	10. They Look So Pretty When They Bleed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blood loss, trail of blood

Tony got the alert late Friday night, about two hours before Penny was supposed to come back home. She’d had a rough day at school, and she’d gone out to patrol almost immediately after dinner.

That was pretty typical of her. Tony talked to her about it once or twice, and she said being up high and swinging through the city helped her think. Well, it was ACDC and similar hard rock groups for him, physical activity for her. Whatever worked, right?

Now he was rushing into his armor as FRIDAY made a route to Penny’s location. As soon as he was in, he had FRIDAY patch through to Karen.

“Penny!” Tony yelled, pushing power into his thrusters. “Penny, what happened?”

He heard her struggle to catch her breath and his fear ratcheted up a few more notches. “Hi, Mr. Stark,” she said, and it sounded like she was in a lot of pain. “Did… did you know it hurts… when you get shot?”

Tony pushed even more power into his thrusters. “Can’t say I’ve ever been shot, kiddo,” he said, “but yeah, I believe it. How did you get shot?”

There was some grunting, and then he heard Karen. “Penny, moving after a gunshot to your upper arm is not recommended,” she advised, a tinge of worry in her automated voice. “You should stay still until help arrives.”

“Listen to your A.I.,” Tony said, trying not to panic. “I put her in your suit for a reason.”

“I’m getting to a safer place,” she said. “Mr. High and Mighty Drug Lord might have backup that also wants to kick my ass, and I don’t want to be around when they come back.”

Her stats flashed on Tony’s screen, and the level of blood loss was getting concerning. The shot must have been near something vital. Then again, Penny didn’t have that much extra blood to spare – something they found out a few months ago, when Dr. Cho ran a battery of tests on her to come up with drugs that would work with her specific biochemistry. Her hemoglobin levels were low, something Dr. Cho attributed to her being a young woman who got hurt a fair amount.

Tony dropped down on the roof where her A.I. said she was, and he didn’t initially see her – just the trail of blood from her limping across the roof top. The sight sent shivers down his spine, and he followed it until he found his eldest sitting against the side of an entrance, trying to web up her wound to staunch the bleeding. She’d been shot in the upper arm, and the rest of her was entirely covered in blood.

“Oh my god, Penny,” he breathed, kneeling down to pick her up. She groaned with pain, and he took off. Karen had already let MedBay know that Penny needed help.

The 10-minute flight back to the Tower were some of the longest 10 minutes of his life. Every time she groaned, it was like the sound was amplified in his ears, and it reminded him of his failures as a mentor. If he had been thinking, if he hadn’t been so desperate, he wouldn’t have brought a 14 year old girl to Germany, he wouldn’t have had her fight off against a bunch of people who were way more experienced than she was. If he had been smarter, he would have listened to her when she talked about Vulture and the mess he was making. If he had been a better mentor, their internship could have just been about messing around in the lab, and with his encouragement she could be building tools that would help save the world.

He touched down and placed Penny on the waiting stretcher. Helen and her team rushed Penny inside, and Tony felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. This was the first time they were really testing the meds they made for her, and he hoped to God they worked, because there wasn’t anything else they could give her if it didn’t work. She blew through normal dosages like water, and just giving her a lot of those medicines wasn’t a viable option because then it was time to worry about blood toxicity and the increasing chances of overdosing or negative side effects.

Tony stepped out of his armor and told FRIDAY to make sure it got clean; if he never had to be covered in Penny’s blood again, it would still be too soon. His mind was frazzled, but he found out which room she would be transferred to after the surgery and sat in it to make the calls he needed to make and start redesigning her suit again.

This was her first bullet, but not her first time being so injured that she needed medical care.

Tony called May and Pepper to let them know what was going on, and then started experimenting with her suit design. Normally, she had a say in what the suit looked and functioned like, but then again, normally she wasn’t severely injured and in surgery when he was doing this.

Gone was the flexible, form-fitting enhanced Spandex, and gone was the fact that she was going to go out with nothing that could stop a bullet. Tony was going to give her the same nanotech he had, and it was going to tie into a necklace or something she could keep on her. Maybe an arm band.

This couldn’t happen again.

The surgery was successful, and Cho and her team brought Penny back into the room where Tony was. She was still far, far too pale, and there were large white bandages encasing her upper arm, but she was breathing easily and on her own.

Tony stayed there with her until she woke up, and when she did, he gave her the rough smile of a parent that had been through hell worrying about her.

If she died, it was on him. It was always going to be on him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mentioned in the last chapter that Penny had been shot before, so I wanted to write that out. Let me know if there's anything you want to see!


	11. Psych 101

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Struggling, crying

Sensory blackout.

This had never happened to her before.

Penny ran through the darkness, trying to figure out what was going on. She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear or feel or even smell anything, and that was just bizarre. Ever since the spider bite, all of her senses were turned up way past normal human limitations, so she was constantly dealing with an overload of information. Little things like the juniors spraying the hallway with Axe deodorant or someone microwaving leftover fish could make her eyes water, and she could hear the classical music Michelle listened to in class through the headphones she hid with her hair.

Uncle Ben was in front of her, suddenly, looking like the day he died. His face was pale and there was blood all over him.

“You failed me, Penny,” he said, looking angry. “You let me die in that alley. You made your Aunt May a widow. You killed me with your inaction.”

“I – no,” Penny said, jolting away from the figure. This couldn’t be Uncle Ben – Uncle Ben wouldn’t say something like that to her! “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt – I’m sorry!”

“Sorry won’t bring me back,” Uncle Ben said, advancing towards her. His fists were balled up and the look of pure hatred felt wrong on his face. Penny had seen him get in arguments with the landlord, with the next-door neighbor, with her teachers and with passing cars that cut him off in traffic, but he’d never looked at anyone the way he looked at her now.

Then there were her parents. They were frozen in time, the age they were in the picture on Ben’s old desk. Her desk, now, and the picture was still there. “We didn’t want you,” her mother said. “We’re not actually dead. We just didn’t want to have to raise such an exhausting excuse of a child anymore. We faked our own deaths to get away from you, and it was worth it.”

In any other context, those statements would have been absurd. One of Penny’s earliest memories was her mother singing her a lullaby, and the song was filled with tenderness and love. But her mother and father had the same expressions on their faces that Ben did, and it made Penny start breaking down and crying.

“Stop,” she cried, “stop! You don’t – this isn’t real. All three of you are dead!”

Then there was Mr. Stark. He was right in front of her, and this time, she did recognize the expression. It was the same one he wore when he was unbelievably angry at her, the one he wore when he took her suit and chewed her out for how out of her element she was and how many lives she endangered.

“You don’t deserve the suit,” he said. “You’re nothing without it. You use Karen to help you with homework and help you get to school when you’ve missed the train. You’re sloppy and lazy and I’m tired of always having to clean up after your messes. You and me, kid? We’re through. This never happened. God, I’m so glad I’m about to get my weekends back.”

The triple rejection broke the last bit of confidence she had. Penny was backing up, trying to get away from the words they were saying. Her confidence was crashing like blocks of concrete around her, and she was stumbling.

Mr. Stark morphed into Quentin Beck, into a superhero she had fought alongside, and he grinned. The illusion fell away and everything clicked. None of this was real.

“Goodbye, Penny,” Mr. Stark said, and he waved before a vicious smile appeared on his face.

Then she was hit by a train.

Penny went under the train, and the pain snapped her out of whatever bizarro world she’d been in before. There was barely any room underneath the train, and before she could pull herself against the metal she felt her ribs break and her head thump and her feet twist in a way that made her almost white out.

Struggling, she made it to the end of the train, where there was an entrance into a car. Penny used the last of her strength to open the door and limp inside before blacking out from the pain.

Penny woke up several hours later in a Dutch jail cell. Her injuries were somewhat healed, but not fully, and there was someone talking to her, but she couldn’t focus on the sounds they were making, even if they were speaking English (which was not a guarantee). Penny managed to get herself out of the jail cell and into the town square, where she was able to check her phone.

Who could she call?

Mr. Stark retired after the final battle, and after what she saw – she understood now that her mom and her dad and her uncle and her mentor would never say any of what Beck said, but she was hesitant to call Mr. Stark for help anyway. He wasn’t supposed to be Iron Man anymore. He was supposed to be Morgan’s dad and Pepper’s husband and Penny’s mentor and he was supposed to be out of all of this.

Calling him would be dragging him back into this. Even worse, it opened the possibility that he would be disappointed in her calling him for help, even though he told her he was only a call away when she left.

But she was in way over her head, and she wanted to say she learned from the ferry and The Vulture. That they both had. Once again, Penny was in way over her head and she needed help to keep a lot of lives from being in danger.

She picked up the phone and put her heart on the line.

“Mr. Stark?” she said, as soon as he picked up. “Mr. Stark, please – I need help. I need – I need help.”

She started crying, and she heard Mr. Stark say he was grabbing her location from her phone. He would be there in less than two hours, so if she could just hold on he would be right there.

“Are you injured?” Mr. Stark asked, and Penny nodded before she realized he couldn’t see her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I – I think a couple of ribs are broken? And it’s hard to walk. My head feels fuzzy.”

There was a sharp intake of breath. “Do you see anywhere you can rest and heal until I get there?” Mr. Stark asked, and Penny slowly turned around, trying to avoid getting dizzy. It didn’t work.

“I – there are a couple of restaurants,” she said, “I still have some euros. I can grab a bite and wait there.”

“That’s a good idea,” Mr. Stark said encouragingly. “You do that, and I’ll be there before you know it.”

The sound of his voice – encouraging, loving, paternal – helped wash away some of the doubts the illusions filled her head with. Penny limped to the restaurant and ordered something she didn’t recognize but had the words ‘sweet spicy chicken’ in the description.

While her order was being made, Penny limped to the bathroom. There was dried blood on her face and she looked about as bad as she felt. With a wet paper towel, she wiped off most of the blood, and while she didn’t feel any better, she hoped it boosted her chances of not being thrown out of the restaurant.

The meal helped her feel a little better, and when she was done, she paid the tab and left. Being around people right now scared her, set her on edge and she couldn’t stand it. There was a large tulip field on the edge of town and Penny laid down in the field, towards the edges, where she couldn’t crush any of the flowers.

She was woken up sometime later by the sound of the jet coming in. Mr. Stark clearly did not share the same ideas about not crushing the tulips, because the jet landed right in the middle of them.

As soon as the door opened, Mr. Stark was jumping out and heading right for her.

“Stop!” she said, crying as she said it. “Stop! I need – tell me something no one else knows! Tell me something only you would know.”

Tony frowned for a moment, but he looked sad as he understood. “Underoos,” he started, “Morgan misses you. The weekend before you left for the trip, you promised her you would be right back, and you painted her nails before you left. You love watching the new Barbie videos with her because the animation and storytelling has gotten a lot better than it was since you used to watch them. You told me that after you helped me put her to bed. Pepper was in Seoul.”

Penny nodded, crying. He got it all right. She ran into his arms and he held her close, her head fitting under his chin.

“I’ve got you, Pen,” he said, rubbing her back as she cried on his shoulder. “It’s going to be alright. We’re gonna fix this together, and you’re going to be alright.”


	12. I Think I've Broken Something

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Broken Bones

Penny wasn’t supposed to be on this mission.

She really wasn’t. She’d just come off her first finals week at MIT, and Tony had taken one look at her and declared that she wasn’t going to go anywhere until she caught up on all the sleep she missed while she was studying.

And Penny had been sleeping, but she got an all-hands-on-deck call from Steve, and that meant something really, really bad was happening. Something she couldn’t just sit out because she needed a little more time to sleep.

So Penny strapped into her gear and got on the plane with the rest of them, because some asshole was trying to open multiple trans-dimensional portals in Barcelona and dammit, she wanted to take MJ there sometime when the world wasn’t in danger.

The team hadn’t fought this hard in ages, and they’d fallen out of habit of training together. There were a lot of stupid, easily-avoided mistakes from almost everyone, including Penny, who managed to web someone just as Thor was calling down lightning on them. Her webbing was a slight electrical conductor, so she got a decent shock before she managed to disengage.

She blamed the shock on what happened next.

Penny stepped back and into a magical construct, which picked her up, shook her around and threw her into a building, breaking her ribs and arm, which came up to shield her face and her head from impact. Penny fell from the impact her body left on the building and into a crumpled heap on the ground, and Scarlet Witch ran to her, trying to make sure she was still alive.

“Penny,” Wanda said, cursing at the blood dribbling out of Penny’s mouth. “Penny, wake up!”

Penny blinked, and Wanda sighed in relief before activating her com.

“Guys, Penny is alive but she’s down,” Wanda said, standing up. “I’m going to bring her back to the jet. She hit the building really hard.”

“Roger that,” Steve said. “After that, get back out here. Strange could use your support.”

Wanda agreed and lifted Penny with her powers, skirting around the edges of the fight. They got to the jet and Wanda got Penny in a bed – which was actually just a triple seat on the plane.

“How are you feeling?” Wanda asked, cleaning Penny up a little. “Can you breathe alright? Will you be okay if I leave you here alone?”

Penny was miserable, but she nodded. She knew what broken ribs felt like, and a broken arm, and it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle on her own. “Go on, Wanda. Knowing me I’ll just use the time to catch up on my podcasts or something.”

Wanda rolled her eyes and made a blanket was lying over Penny before she left. Penny wished Wanda could have stayed, but it was bad enough Penny was down – they still needed every hand they had.

The team came back into the plane two and a half episodes of Dear Hank and John later. Steve was limping, being supported by Thor, and Dr. Strange was bleeding from a long cut on his forehead. Penny sat up on the bed, but she did it too quickly and her ribs reminded her they were only half-healed.

“Is everyone okay?” she asked, and Wanda sat down next to her.

“This mission was… not a good one,” she said. “Several injuries we could have – and should have – prevented. We are rusty.”

Penny nodded, and she scooted over so Wanda could sit next to her. Wanda ran her fingers through Penny’s hair and leaned back in the seat before they both buckled in.

The team was silent as the plane flew back to New York, and Steve warned them not to go too far. The entire team was going to debrief as soon as all of the injured (including him) had been checked out by the medical team. Penny nodded, and Wanda helped her to Medbay, where her arm was set and her ribs were checked out before she was allowed to go grab a bite to eat.

When everyone was feeling a little more human. Steve called them all back together. Penny’s mistakes were dissected, leaving her feel bare, but so were everyone else’s, including Steve’s. He called for weekly team training meetings, and people needed to come to at least two per month to be considered active members of the Avengers.

Penny slumped away from the meeting and went to go rest, but when she got back to her room, Tony was there.

“Hey there,” he said, with a deceptively calm tone. Penny groaned and sunk into a chair. She knew that tone. “I thought you were supposed to be resting after staying awake for almost a week straight.”

“I did,” Penny said. “Karen can tell you. I was down for about four hours.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Four hours isn’t nearly enough to replace what you lost,” he said, “and you knew that. You shouldn’t have been out there today.”

Penny shrugged. “Cap called an all-hands-on-deck. What, was I supposed to tell him I was out of commission because I went too hard cramming for Professor Khan’s chemistry final?”

“Yes,” Tony said, his voice deadly serious. “He needed to know you weren’t at top shape. I’m pretty sure if I wind back the tape from your suit, you got hurt because of it.”

Penny blushed and didn’t meet his eyes. Tony sighed and slung an arm around her shoulders.

“Kid, if I come down on you hard during times like this, it’s because I’m trying to help you avoid the places where I fucked up,” he said. “Trust me. You don’t want to get to a point where your best friend has to come confiscate your property because the government is scared you’re going to blow up a major metro city while you’re drunk.”

Penny frowned and leaned into his touch.

“Ned would never do that to me,” Penny said, “and MJ would encourage me to use my suit to take the American government offline. Or at least the parts of it which it uses to spy on the world digitally.”

“Which reminds me that your girlfriend is terrifying,” Tony said. “You get what I mean, though, right? This can’t happen again.”

“I know,” Penny said, yawning. Tony chuckled and tucked her in, even after she made a face.

“Ah, ah, ah,” he said, waggling his finger at her. “Tired spider-babies need all the rest they can get. Now, do you need me to read you a story or bring you a glass of water?”

“Go away,” Penny muttered, and fell asleep to the sound of Tony laughing as he walked away.


	13. Breathe In, Breathe Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Delayed drowning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not a doctor. If you (or if someone around you) might have taken in water or drowned, please see a doctor!

Penny hadn’t been that lake that long.

So why was she still coughing and feeling like she was going to hurl?

After Mr. Stark fished her out of the water, Penny found her way back to Ned, to talk about the weird shit she’d seen and how Mr. Stark came to help her out. And even though the heater helped her out, helped a lot, her suit was still kinda damp. They went back to her place and Penny got changed into her pajamas, but she still didn’t feel great.

Ugh. This is why she never went swimming. That, and because she was an absolute athletic wimp before the spider-bite.

They told Aunt May that Penny got pushed into the pool at the party they were at and Aunt May made them both hot chocolate with marshmallows. They were both drinking out of Star Wars mugs, and Penny did feel legitimately better with the warm drink in her hands, but for some reason it still felt harder to breathe than it should have.

Was it because of what she’d seen? Because she knew there was someone pushing extremely dangerous weapons onto the streets?

Maybe.

Ned ended up sleeping over on their couch, and he seemed really worried about her, but Penny was pretty sure it was just a side effect of her dip in the lake – nothing her super-healing couldn’t take care of.

Aunt May fussed over her anyway. She was going to be working the graveyard shift at the hospital, so she wasn’t going to be there when Penny and Ned woke up, but she made them promise her that they would call if Penny didn’t feel better in the morning.

Penny didn’t make it that far.

She woke up in the middle of the night and she felt like she couldn’t breathe – at all. Feeling around, she grabbed her mask and slipped it on, noting that it was still slightly wet.

“Karen,” she gasped, barely taking in any oxygen, “Karen, help!”

Karen’s slightly-robotic voice was an immediate comfort. “You appear to be in respiratory distress, Penny,” the AI said. “Vitals indicate you need immediate medical assistance.”

“No, really?” Penny coughed. “Shit, shit... I can’t go to a hospital, Karen. They won’t know how to treat me.”

“Consulting with Mr. Stark,” she reported, and his face flashed on the screen in front of Penny.

“Hey kid, how’re you feeling?” he asked.

“Not so great, Mr. Stark,” she coughed. “Think I brought some of the lake back in my lungs.”

“Well, that’s not great,” he said. Penny stared at the wall in her bedroom, still trying to get more air into her lungs through the fabric of a mask. “I’m going to have a suit come pick you up and take you to the facility up north. There’s a medical team there that will be able to help you.”

Penny’s stomach sank at the idea of being in a strange medical facility without anyone there, but she didn’t have much choice. Even with her lungs literally trying to pull in as much oxygen as they could, she felt dizzy and faint.

“Okay,” she breathed, and stood up to go tell Ned what was happening. Her head swam, and she reached out to steady herself on the wall, ending the call by ripping her mask off. It didn’t help much. “Ned! NED!”

Her best friend in the world was snoring on the couch, but he woke up when she yelled.

“Oh my god, Penny,” he said, and went to help her to a seat. “This is really serious.”

“I know,” she said. It felt like one of her asthma attacks from before the spider bite. She put her head between her knees and tried to remember where she put her inhalers after she figured out she didn’t need them anymore. “Ned,” she gasped, “go to the bathroom medicine cabinet. There should still be an inhaler in there.”

He ran there and brought it to her. The prescription had only been filled seven months ago; the active ingredients could still help her, hopefully. She took a few hits and was rewarded when the tight ball that was her chest relaxed a little.

“Thank you,” she said, and slumped back into the chair she was in. “Mr. Stark is sending a suit here, but I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to wait that long.”

Ned frowned. “I can get your mask too,” he offered. “When is the suit going to get here?”

She shrugged, and when he brought her the mask again, she saw an alert that it was right outside her bedroom window.

“You okay, kid?” Mr. Stark asked when he saw her again. “You disappeared on me for a while there.”

“Emergency inhaler helped,” she said. She got in warmer clothing than just her pajamas, shrugging on a coat and some jeans over the pajamas before putting her shoes back on. It was an old, familiar routine from years of having to go to the ER during winter, when cold and flu season made her life hell. “Do I just… go in the suit?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Stark said, sounding distracted. “It’ll take you where you need to go. Best way in the world to travel.”

Ned helped her climb out her window – she was still a little fuzzy-headed – and the suit took her upstate, to a place where a Dr. Helen Cho and her team were waiting there to help her. They were very nice, and the facility was very clean and very advanced, but at that moment Penny wanted to go back to the ER experiences she had as a kid, when Aunt May or Uncle Ben would come and sit with her and watch a movie with her and hold her and tell her everything was going to be okay.

Instead, there was an empty suit waiting to take her home after the medical team was done with her. Ned was in her room, working on Legos to pass the time, and Aunt May never even knew anything was wrong.

Too bad it all felt so wrong.


	14. Is Something Burning?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fire.

Penny fucking hated apartment building fires.

She hated everything about them. She hated how complicated they were, and how much could burn in such a short amount of time. She hated seeing people crying at the edges, dozens of people made homeless because of a faulty wire or a candle left to burn too close to a curtain. She hated it when she found people she couldn’t save, who died before she got there.

And she hated how the air always scorched her throat and cooked her skin, even through the multi-million-dollar specialized suit.

Penny had been told there were two kids still up here, kids who had been left alone while their mother went down to bodega to grab a few more things for dinner, and she was crying her eyes out on the street outside as she watched firefighters go through the building. A quick scan told Penny they were still in their apartment, but it was on the 10th floor and firefighters were having a hard time getting up there, since the fire was on the 7th and 8th floors.

That’s where Spider-Woman came in.

Penny swung up to the 10th floor and immediately got blasted with hot, dry, overwhelming smoke. It was blinding, so Karen switched over to displaying graphics of where the children were and how Penny could get to them.

The door was locked, so Penny broke it down with a couple of well-placed punches and walked through the hole she made. The kids were in their room, huddling in the closet, and Penny pushed their air conditioning unit out of their room to give both her and the kids a way to exit.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing the kids. They were young – the older one was maybe 9, and the younger one was about 6 – and tried to figure out how she was going to get them all out. “Okay, here’s the plan. I’ll hold Frankie and you, Timmy, hold onto my back while I swing us down. Is that something you can do for me, buddy? I’m gonna need you to hold on as tight as you can.”

He nodded, but Penny decided not to take chances with a traumatized elementary school kid. There was a kid’s robe on the floor of the bedroom, and she used the belt to tie Timmy to her back as she grabbed Frankie.

There was a deep crackling in the wood, and Penny made sure everyone was secure one last time before she jumped out of the window and got all three of them to the ground. The mother ran over, still crying, and kissed both of her kids as they ran into her arms.

“Spider-Woman, thank you!” the mother sobbed, and Penny gave a sort of half salute before swinging off into the night. The firefighters had the rest of this in hand, and she didn’t want to go back into that fire unless she had to.

“Penny, you inhaled a lot of smoke,” Karen warned, “and you’re dehydrated. You should stop and rest for the night soon, and let your lungs heal before continuing physical exertion.”

Fire rescues always gave her a headache, and tonight was no different. “Alright, Karen,” Penny said, swinging home. She got home just as the headache was reaching its peak, and she stumbled into bed without managing to get that glass of water Karen told her to drink.

The headache never went away. Penny’s head throbbed with every moment, and even though she was bone-tired from the rescue, she couldn’t sleep. The teen started crying quietly, but she was still dehydrated – there weren’t many tears she could cry, and crying made the pain even worse, even though she couldn’t stop.

Walls in New York City apartments have never been accused of being too thick, and after a few minutes, May came in to check in on her superhero surrogate daughter. She sat down on the bed next to Penny, concerned. There weren’t a lot of reasons why Penny would cry anymore, but she might have just had a rough patrol.

That’s when the smell of smoke hit Aunt May. It was still clinging to Penny’s clothing and person, and she frowned.

“Penny, did you go into a structure fire tonight?” May asked, shifting into her nurse’s training. It was hard to tell if Penny’s face was so red because of fire exposure or crying, but she knew her little girl was far too warm for her preference. “I’m going to get you a glass of water.”

Penny nodded slightly. Her head was still pounding, and she hated the motion. “Could you – could you also get my headache meds?” she asked. “Please?”

May nodded and brought her both. Penny dealt with sensory overloads at times, and Stark and Cho developed a superpowered Tylenol for her that would knock out a normal person who tried it, and they kept the bottle in the bathroom. May then helped Penny sit up in her bed and held the glass for Penny as she drank.

“You know, you could probably use some oxygen,” May said. “You should have gone back to the Tower before you came home. Stark could have helped you.”

Penny shrugged. “I didn’t feel this bad when I was swinging home,” she said. “I was only in there for about 15 minutes. I didn’t think it was that serious.”

May huffed and hugged Penny. Of course she didn’t think it was that serious. May came home once and found Penny trying to give herself stitches after she got stabbed on patrol.

After she finished the water, Penny looked a little better, but it was still going to take a while for the medicine to kick in. She settled in May’s lap, and May ran her fingers through Penny’s hair the way she used to when Penny was smaller.

“It’s okay,” May said. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re going to be alright, okay? I’ve got you and I’m not going anywhere.”

Penny fell asleep soon after the meds kicked in but May stayed there for a little longer. This part of the job – supporting Penny even when she made dangerous choices, even when she put herself on the line to help others – was so, so hard, but May was glad she could be there for Penny. Glad that Penny hadn’t entirely outgrown needing her aunt around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has commented! I really mean it when I say hearing from you guys helps me out so much. If there's anything you would like to see, or see more of, feel free to let me know!


	15. Into The Unknown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Science Gone Wrong

“Oh my god, what _is_ that?”

Penny was very aware that she was exceptionally lucky. She got bit by an experimental OsCorp spider, and it gave her three days from hell and amazing superpowers for the rest of her life after that. She looked human, and while there were some negative side effects, like a metabolism that made sure she was always snacking on something and an inability to be helped by most commercially available medications.

She’d never really considered how badly her transformation could have gone, and that was partially because she didn’t have anything to compare herself to. Now, though… she understood.

Staring at a lizard-man-creature-thing in the middle of Union Station, Penny was horrified. The scales were deep green and covered the being’s body, and the way its eyes moved and tracked her was natural for something that appeared to be vaguely man-shaped.

Well, except for the giant prehensile tail that was holding a sobbing hostage.

“Karen, what is that?” Penny asked, dodging a large chunk of concrete the Lizard sent her way.

“Scans are unconclusive at this time,” Karen said.

“That’s helpful,” Penny snarked, using her webs to get out of the Lizard’s throw range. “Shit, shit, shit, this is so weird. I can’t even get close to that thing for too long. Does anyone know why he’s so angry?”

The Lizard roared, and Penny tried to get some of the civilians trapped in the Station out of harm’s way. She got them all in one area and sprayed some webbing over top of them to act as netting, protecting them from anything else the Lizard might throw.

“Stay down, and stay out of that thing’s way,” she said, and went back to where the Lizard was still holding his hostage in his tail. “Hey yo creepy, whatcha up to?”

“SPIDER-WOMAN,” he roared, and his grip on the hostage increased. The man he held was beet red and sobbing, desperate fingers around where the Lizard’s tail was wrapped around his neck. “YOU MUST PAY!”

Penny held her hands up, trying to show how unarmed and also not dangerous she was. (Both of those were false, but she didn’t trust this guy.) “Hang on, my dude,” she said, mindful of the hostage. “I’m here. This is between you and me, right? Let the guy go and I’ll listen to anything you want to say.”

The Lizard threw the man, and the hit looked painful, but after a few moments he crawled to the safety net, where others started helping him.

“Awesome,” Penny said, forcing her voice to stay upbeat. “Alright, I’m all yours. What am I paying for? I don’t ditch and dash, I swear. Is this about the library book I didn’t return in fourth grade?”

The Lizard threw a boulder at her, and she had to web out of the way quickly. “Don’t you ever shut up?” it yelled, and Penny stayed up high. “No. You. OsCorp knows it created you. It wants to create more of you.”

Penny’s face drained of blood and she came down from where she was, so struck by the news she couldn’t even try to deny it. “What – what do you mean, create more of me? I was an accident!”

The Lizard snarled. “Yes, you were, Spider-Woman,” he said, “and you shouldn’t have ever existed. I was once Dr. Curt Conners, a brilliant scientist at the top of my field! But now I’m this, and it’s all your fault!”

Penny dodged another piece of debris. “This feels like misplaced anger, buddy,” she said, and reinforced the webbing shield she had over the civilians. “I wasn’t the one who did this to you! If you stop throwing things, maybe we can talk this out!”

In response, the Lizard threw an even bigger, heavier piece of concrete and rebar.

“I guess not,” Penny said, and saw her opening. She webbed one of The Lizard’s arms to himself and then another before wrapping him in even more webbing, the way an actual spider might do to its prey.

There was a moment before the police were going to storm in, before the people trapped were going to test her work to make sure the Lizard was really tied up, and Penny took that moment to get closer to him. He was still angry, but he stopped roaring when she came closer.

“Tell me who did this to you,” she said. “Tell me, and I’ll make sure there aren’t any more experiments like this.”

“Norman Osborn,” he said, and Penny’s eyes widened behind the mask. “This goes all the way to the top, Spider-Woman. But if you want to kill yourself taking that empire down, well, be my guest.”

The police burst in then, and the people were safe, and the moment was ruined. Spider-Woman webbed away before the cops could execute any of the (multiple) open warrants calling for her arrest, and made it to the top of a nearby building, heart still pounding with what she learned.

“Karen?” Penny whispered, chewing on her bottom lip. “Get me everything you can about Norman. See if he knows who I am.”

The A.I.’s voice was steady, even as Penny felt shaky. “I would need access into Osborn private servers to determine that information, Penny. I would also advise bringing Mr. Stark in on this. As one of Norman Osborn’s main competitors in several fields, he has decades of personal experience with the man.”

Tony was retired. Tony had invented time travel and saved the universe. Tony was getting old and inventing things for the hell of it now, not because the world was going to end or a city was going to be destroyed if he didn’t.

Tony was also her dad, and she’d been meaning to swing by his place for a while now.

“Alright,” she said, and watched Karen plot a course from where she was to the Tower, which Tony re-bought after the final battle. “Set a detour for that smoothie place he keeps talking about, okay? He likes it when I bring those with me.”


	16. A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hallucinations

Penny thought, after the bite, that she couldn’t get sick anymore.

She was mostly right – she didn’t get colds as much, and her immune system was a lot better than it had been pre-bite. But that didn’t mean her immune system was impervious.

The first sign something was wrong was when she woke up with a dry cough and a pounding head. Penny sat up slowly, and MJ woke up too.

“Hmm, you okay?” MJ asked, blinking her eyes open enough to look at her phone. “It’s 6:45, babe. Trying to get you up and out the door by 8 is a minor miracle, and you came in at 1.”

“I don’t… feel right,” Penny admitted. The words felt like mush as she said them.

MJ sat up then too and felt Penny’s forehead with the back of her hand. “Shit, you’re burning up,” MJ said, and went to go turn the lights on. Penny hissed at the sudden light on already-sensitive eyes, but MJ rolled her eyes and got a digital thermometer.

MJ, the love of Penny’s life, sanitized the thermometer by sticking it under rubbing alcohol and then sticking it in Penny’s mouth. Penny whined through the thermometer, but MJ gave her a look.

“You were just bragging about how tough you were after you put the Scorpion in jail last week,” MJ said. “I think you can handle this.”

It took a few tries for the thermometer to get a reading, but finally it came out at 103.5 F. High – really, really high – and not something they could treat themselves. MJ frowned and sanitized the thermometer again before putting it away.

Penny fell back into the bed, feeling cold without the blankets around her. It was a warm summer night when Penny had been out patrolling, but now it didn’t feel anywhere near warm enough for Penny.

MJ came back in the room and sighed. “Pen, you know we’re gonna have to call Stark,” she said, getting out of her pajamas and into jeans and an old indie band shirt she picked up at a flea market. “This is way out of my ability to handle.”

“Any chance this will just go away and I’ll wake up in a few hours to coffee and pancakes?” Penny asked, her voice muffled by the pillow she was burying herself in.

“Ha. No.” MJ pulled back the covers and Penny immediately folded into herself, shivering up a storm. “Shit, babe. You know what, just get me into your phone and I’ll call your dad.”

Penny unlocked her phone and handed it to MJ before pulling the covers back and trying to get a little more sleep. If she just slept this off, everything would be fine.

She didn’t wake up again until she heard her dad in the room. Penny opened her eyes again, under some protest, and that’s when MJ committed the ultimate betrayal: she stuck the thermometer in Penny’s mouth again.

As soon as the reading was over, Penny spat the thermometer out, and then reached for a glass of water near her bed to wash the taste out of her mouth. “Gross, babe,” she said. “Ugh, that’s horrible.”

MJ and Tony were busy staring at the app on MJ’s phone, which had the readout on the screen. “Fuck,” she said softly. “It was 103.5 an hour ago. How did it hit 105 so fast?”

Tony cursed under his breath. “You were right to call me when you did,” he said. “We need to get her to MedBay. If her temperature stays this high, she could start seizing.”

“I’ll show you seizing,” Penny muttered. “I’ll seize the day. I’ll be fine.”

MJ and Tony exchanged Look 23: Why Do We Love This Dumbass, which was patented by Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts and James ‘Rhodey’ Rhodes sometime in the late ‘90s.

“Yeah, kiddo, Happy is downstairs and we’re taking you to the Tower,” Tony said. “Can you get dressed?”

Penny tried to get out of bed and immediately started falling. Tony and MJ rushed to catch her, and Tony sighed.

“That’s a no, then,” he said, and picked her up, trying (and failing) to keep the panic out of his voice. “MJ, get the door and lock up?”

MJ nodded and grabbed both of their phones as well. She met him at the elevator, and they rode down together, trying to ignore how Penny was shaking like a leaf in Tony’s arms.

Happy got them to the Tower in record time, and Penny was still shaking when Tony got them upstairs. Helen was waiting for them, and the moment Tony laid Penny on the bed, she immediately grabbed for him.

“No, please, don’t go,” she begged, and it broke Tony, MJ and Happy’s hearts. “Stay, please! Mr. Stark, please!”

“I’m not going anywhere, Pen,” he said, and stayed holding her even as the medical team wheeled into MedBay. Dr. Cho started taking her temperature and gasped when the readout said Penny was at 106.3 F.

“We need to get her temperature down now,” Helen said, and sent one of her assistants to get the strongest antipyretic they had and an anticonvulsant. The assistant was quick, but not quick enough; by the time he got back, Penny was a minute into a seizure.

Tony was ushered away from Penny, as were Happy and MJ, and they were left to wait outside the Medbay as the medical team worked to help Penny. They all looked faintly traumatized by what they’d seen – after all, Penny was so strong, so smart, and they’d all seen her throw herself into danger time and time again.

Dr. Cho came out a half hour later, and everyone stood up.

“Is she okay?” MJ asked desperately.

“Penny isn’t out of danger yet,” Dr. Cho said, “but we got her temperature down. It’s still a high fever, but it’s not nearly as high as it was.”

The group collectively relaxed in relief.

“The anti-fever medication we gave her is working, but not as well as we’d like,” Dr. Cho said. “Because of that, we’re preparing a cool bath for her, to help get her temperature down a few more degrees. If someone could sit with her during the bath, it would probably help her a lot. Penny is still very confused, and she’s very defensive because of it.”

There was an awkward moment between the three of them. They all wanted to help her.

“Someone should probably call May and let her know what’s going on,” MJ said. “I can do that.”

“While you’re doing that, I’ll go pick her up,” Happy said. “Tonight’s her night off. She’ll be at home.”

That left Tony to sit with her, at least for the moment. He went into the MedBay and pulled up a chair near Penny’s bed. Even though she’d hit a late growth spurt in her senior year, shooting up several inches, she still seemed so small in the bed made to also accommodate heroes like Captain America and Thor.

Penny’s eyes shot open shortly after he sat down, and she was intently focused on something behind him. “Mr. Stark, move!” she said, scrambling to the far side of her bed. “It’s Thanos, he’s back, he’s going to kill us! Move!”

“Penny, it’s okay,” Tony said, his heart breaking a little. She hadn’t called him that in years. “Pen, Pen, it’s okay. You’re safe. Thanos is dead. Captain Marvel killed him.”

“No, he’s back! He’s right there, he’s right behind you, you have to move!” Her voice was cracking and begging, and Tony had never seen her this afraid.

“Penny, don’t worry about me,” he said. He held her hand, noticing how clammy it was. “I’m Iron Man, remember? You and I have fought him before and we won.”

She did calm down at that, her eyes closing again, and then Helen came in.

“The bath is ready,” she said. “Is MJ around? She might be better at staying with Penny for this next part.”

Tony shrugged. “She went to call May, so she should still be around. I can go grab her.”

He went to go find MJ, who was still outside, back pressed up against a wall with her hands in her hair. The sun had risen, and the early light was peeking into the room.

Tony slid down next to her, ignoring the ache in his joints after decades of abuse. “How’re you holding up?”

MJ groaned, not bothering to look at him. “May should be here soon,” MJ said. “I just… I should have been in there, but I couldn’t. Penny knows how shit I am with the idea of her in pain; it’s why she doesn’t come directly home after bad patrols anymore. I told her I’d leave her ass if she kept ignoring medical emergencies.”

“And she’s better for it,” Tony said. “No one ignored this, though. You guys called in help as soon as you realized something was wrong.”

MJ stayed quiet. Tony felt an urge to wrap an arm around her, like he would do for Penny, but even though MJ had been a part of Penny’s life as long as Tony had, Tony didn’t know his daughter’s girlfriend that well.

“Helen was asking if you wanted to be in there with Penny when they give her a cold bath,” Tony continued. “You don’t have to, if it’s too much.”

MJ sniffled and stood up, brushing herself off. “Nah,” she said, her voice still a little wobbly. “Penny needs me, right? Besides, she’s on the mend, right? So the worst is over.”

Tony couldn’t let himself believe it – the labs were still out, there was still so much unknown – but he smiled and used a chair to help him stand up. “I’ll catch Happy and May up when they get here, then,” he said, and clapped her on the shoulder. “Don’t be afraid to tap out if it gets too intense. There’s a bunch of us here for both of you, okay?”

MJ nodded, looking grateful, and she went back into the room Tony had just come from. Tony, for his part, went to go make coffee for everyone, including the medical staff.

It had already been a long couple of hours. Even when they got Penny’s temperature down, they still needed to wait on the lab samples to tell them what was wrong, and that was going to take a lot more time than MJ was thinking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has been commenting and leaving kudos! I really do love hearing from you all. Please, if there's anything you want to see more of, feel free to let me know!


	17. I Did Not See That Coming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wrongfully Accused
> 
> tw: blood

“Spider-Woman’s real name… is Penny Parker!”

As soon as Penny heard those words, she knew she wasn’t safe anymore. The rest of the crowd turned to her, and Penny’s eyes met MJ’s.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and took off swinging.

Penny had never been especially popular with NYPD, and she never felt that to be truer than when she started swinging away. There was a line of police cars coming after her, and even when she thought she found safety for a minute on top of an old apartment building, it wasn’t long before she heard helicopters getting close. News or police, she didn’t know, but it also didn’t matter: if either caught up to her, she was dead.

Penny’s phone was blowing up, and she realized the cops were probably tracking her through it. If they weren’t, then they would be, or even worse – the feds.

Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck.

This was so, so bad.

Somehow, Penny never made any plans for her identity becoming public. She still was too young to vote, too young to drink, too young to smoke (not that she wanted to do that last one). She never figured on going public, and she never figured on letting her enemies catch up with her. Somehow, she always thought she would be able to be a masked hero, a question and a mystery.

Penny knew she couldn’t go back to the apartment. If the cops weren’t there already, they soon would be, and she didn’t need to endanger Aunt May anymore than she already had. Penny changed courses, then, and started swinging to Avengers Tower, as it was becoming known again.

If anyone could help her now, it would have to be the Avengers.

Penny made it halfway there when her spider-sense alerted her. She twisted automatically and felt a high-caliber bullet pass too close to her.

“SPIDER-WOMAN,” a loudspeaker boomed, “YOU ARE ORDERED TO STAND DOWN. YOU ARE WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN THE DEATH OF QUENTIN BECK.”

Penny physically couldn’t hyperventilate as she kept swinging, but she started going even faster than she had already been swinging. She knew a bad deal when she saw it; there was no way she would be getting any sort of justice from the NYPD.

When she didn’t come quietly, they shot even more bullets at her. One caught her in the lower leg, and Penny fell to the top of a building close to the Tower, crying out with pain.

She couldn’t stop here. She couldn’t stop. If she stopped, she was dead.

She couldn’t stop.

Penny pushed herself to her feet, aching with pain from the hard landing. She couldn’t put any weight on her left leg, but it didn’t matter, because she didn’t have to walk. Penny webbed the wound up, creating a temporary bandage, and took to the skies again, going a little slower than she had been.

Bullets rained at her again, and another grazed her back as she released her last web strand and landed on the Avengers building.

“Karen,” Penny panted, “Karen, please tell me someone is home today. Please tell me someone is there who can help me out.”

“There are no Avengers currently in the Tower,” Karen responded, “but Captain America and the Winter Soldier are currently on route.”

“Cool, patch me into them,” she said, hobbling through her entrance and to the nearest first aid kit. Her leg had already bled through the webbing, and she knew she needed something more substantial to replace it.

Both of their pictures came through the built-in screen in her mask, and Penny had to calm her breathing so she could actually talk to them. “I need help,” she panted, “I need serious help. Mysterio framed me for his death and leaked my name to the press. NYPD shot me twice and if the Feds aren’t about ready to storm the Tower looking for me I’ll eat my suit.”

“We’re almost there,” Sam responded, and Penny could hear the sounds of a motorcycle in the background of his call. “Just hold on a little longer, alright, kid? How bad is the bullet wound?”

“I’m putting pressure on it,” she said, “but my leg is entirely useless right now. They also got me across the back, but I haven’t been able to do anything about it just yet.”

Bucky cursed and the sounds of a motorcycle got louder. It made sense, in a way – Sam’s wings only supported one of them, so if they were working together they needed a different way to get around.

Penny couldn’t do anything but keep pressure on the wound and stay where she was. There was a small red puddle forming beneath her, but Penny couldn’t help it – she could only focus on putting pressure on her leg and listening to Karen’s voice, who read the messages of support her friends and family were sending her.

It was nice.

Penny lost track of time for a while, and she wasn’t really aware of anything until she heard Sam and Bucky get out of the elevator and run to her. The bandage she was holding against her leg was completely soaked, and she felt light-headed when Bucky picked her up.

“Shit, Wilson, she’s in a bad way,” he said, watching as her head lolled back in his arms. “Let Happy know. He should be downstairs by now.”

“Happy?” Penny asked weakly.

“Yeah, Webs,” Sam responded. “What, did you think we’d load you on the back of our bike?”

Penny couldn’t really think at all at that point. The pain was still really bad, but she was starting to feel a little floaty. They got back in the elevator, and Penny felt something tapping her face.

“Stay with us,” Sam said. “You don’t get to check out yet. Pepper would kill me.”

“So use less of it…” Penny murmured, her voice getting quieter.

“Yeah, she’s Stark’s kid,” Bucky said, and as soon as the elevator door opened they were running to the car and loading Penny in the back. There were additional medical supplies in there, and they started trying to patch Penny up on their own as Happy got them to a SHIELD facility not that far away.

Penny was barely responsive by the time they got there, and Bucky passed Penny off to a doctor who had patched him and Sam up before. Happy called Pepper to let her know they’d gotten Penny to a medical facility, and Sam went to find him and Bucky some clothing that wasn’t covered in the blood of a 17-year-old girl who was in way over her head.

Days like this made Bucky wish sometimes that he wasn’t on the side of the angels. He and his rifle had words for the cold, dead corpse of Quentin Beck, as well as the very much living asshole who decided to leak the identity of a teenager trying to help keep the world safe.


	18. Panic! at the Disco

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Panic Attacks

In five (active, non-Blip) years of being an active superhero, Penny picked up an impressive array of bad experiences.

After fighting the Vulture, Penny couldn’t be in tight, enclosed spaces anymore. She preferred to avoid elevators where she could, and anything where her chest was being held in one place was a one-way ticket to a panic attack.

After going to space, she couldn’t watch certain movies anymore. The Martian reminded her of the rusty orange dust on Titan, which really sucked, because before the Blip The Martian had been one of her favorite hard-science movies. She loved watching Matt Damon science his way out of trouble.

After going to Europe, and coming home, Penny was afraid of crowds. Now that everyone knew her identity, it was hard to go out as herself. She coped by getting into makeup and wigs, but it wasn’t a perfect solution, and she felt a bit like Hannah Montana. Which sucked, because she didn’t get any of the cool perks of being a celebrity with a double life. She just had bank robbers and supervillains and other assorted creeps who were ready to take their grievances out on her at a moment’s notice.

So if on any given day, Penny was a bit of a wreck, most of the people in her life understood. She did a good job of keeping it mostly together, and she stayed close to people who loved her in spite of everything she’d been through. Morgan was a sweetheart, and while she knew Penny was different than most other people, she treated Penny like they were in fact sisters.

Meaning she got into her makeup, begged her to play dolls with her and asked a lot of invasive questions about Penny’s relationship with MJ.

Her tendency to ask Penny a lot of questions Penny didn’t want to answer wasn’t a problem until it suddenly it was. Morgan was 8 years old when her school had a “Second Snap” Day, to remember when everyone came home and the sacrifices made by the world’s heroes to keep everyone here. Penny was spending the weekend with Pepper and Morgan, and they were eating dinner when Morgan started asking questions about that day.

“What was Thanos like?”

Penny and Pepper both froze, and Penny dropped her fork, sauce from the pasta dish splattering on her hand.

“What do you mean, sweetie?” Pepper asked, as Penny wiped her hand off with her napkin.

“I mean, you both fought him, right?” Morgan asked. “What was he like? Was he really that tall and that evil?”

“Yeah,” Penny said. “He was. I fought him twice, and he really was a giant. Almost my height and half again at the time, so about 8? Maybe 9 feet?”

Morgan’s eyes went big. She dashed away from the dinner table and came back with a sparkly pink notebook and a pencil. “Can you tell me any more about him?” she asked. “My school wants us all to talk to our relatives about what the Second Snap was like.”

Pepper sighed. “Maybe after dinner,” she said. “First, you have to finish eating.”

Morgan put the notebook to the side, at the empty seat at the table, and Pepper reached out to rub Penny’s hand. She saw how pale Penny got when Morgan mentioned Thanos’ name.

“You don’t have to answer Morgan’s questions if it’s still too hard, sweetheart,” Pepper offered. “I was there too. Morgan can use my answers for her school project.”

Penny shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t that much older than she is now when aliens invaded the city. Maybe I should talk to her about it.”

Pepper frowned, remembering that invasion, and Morgan’s eyes went big. “Aliens invaded New York City?” she asked, incredulous. “Whoa! Did you fight them?”

Penny shook her head. “I didn’t get my powers until a few years after that. Your dad fought them, though. He’s the reason the rest of the city and I survived.”

Morgan still remembered Tony. It hadn’t been that long since he died – only two years – and she still had strong memories of him. It was a blessing, because no one had to tell her that Tony was a hero. She already knew he was. To her, everyone else was just filling in the blanks of how Tony was a hero before he became her dad.

“But you were fighting with Dad when he went up against Thanos, right? Both of you?” Morgan asked.

“Penny fought against him with your Dad both times,” Pepper said. “I wasn’t a superhero then. I only fought against him with your dad the second time around.”

Morgan sped through the rest of dinner, to the point where Pepper and Penny both had to tell her to slow down or else she would make herself sick. As soon as the dishes were cleared away, Morgan had her notebook back open and she was reading questions off a sheet of paper.

“What do you remember most about that day?” Morgan asked.

Being brought back into existence on an alien planet. Playing the universe’s most dangerous game of keep-away. Losing yet another father figure, and worse yet, watching him die. Watching another father figure die.

Penny’s heart rate picked up and her breathing turned shallow. Pepper, who knew the signs of panic attacks well after the Battle of Manhattan, asked Morgan to go play with her dolls for a few minutes – they’d talk later.

Morgan clearly didn’t want to go, but Pepper gave her a look and off she went, taking her notebook with her. Pepper guided Penny’s head between her knees and encouraged her pseudo-daughter to take deep breaths.

“Hey, hey,” Pepper said softly. “It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re in the Tower. It’s been years since the Battle at the Compound. You’re safe.”

“I’m safe,” Penny repeated, trying to will her heart to slow down and stop feeling like it was going to pound right out of her chest. “I’m safe. We’re all safe. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“You’re okay,” Pepper agreed, and when Penny calmed down a little, pulled her into a hug. “You’re okay, sweetie. I’ve got you.”

Penny nodded. “I… I don’t think I can talk about that day. Not yet. It’s still too – I mean…”

“I know,” Pepper said. “It’s okay. I’ll talk to Morgan. If you clear off the dishes, I’ll help her with her project. Do we have a deal?”

Penny nodded, and Pepper went to go see how her youngest was doing. There were a lot of days they all missed Tony, but his loss was never felt as keenly as days like these.


	19. Broken Hearts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grief/Mourning Loved One/Survivor's Guilt

There were a lot of graves in the Parker family.

Penny never met either of her dad’s parents. They died in 9/11, both working in the North Tower. Their names were carved into the memorial where the buildings used to stand, and Penny visited there a couple of times with her family or on school field trips. The names evoked a weird sense in her, like she should know them and she should be sadder about the tragedy than she was, but she was a newborn when the Towers fell. Her mom was still on maternity leave when her dad’s parents died.

Her parents died when Penny was 6. Penny didn’t have many memories of them, but she remembered their funeral. Remembered how Aunt May took her to a big store and bought her a black dress for the day, and remembered how for the first month or so, she slept on their couch, because Aunt May and Uncle Ben didn’t originally have space for her. They moved into a bigger, more expensive apartment as soon as they could without breaking their lease, and Penny got a brand-new room and a bunch of science posters and started going to a new school.

Her mom’s parents died when Penny was 10. She didn’t know them that well. They were old, and they lived somewhere in the Midwest, so Penny didn’t see them a lot. They didn’t die at the same time, but within the same year. Times were really tight then, since Ben wasn’t getting as many hours at work, so Penny didn’t go to either funeral.

She kinda wished she did, just so she could meet people who knew her mom before she met Penny’s dad.

Uncle Ben died when Penny was 13. That was the first time she’d ever watched someone die, and she still had nightmares about it. She went to his funeral wearing a brand-new black dress and hated every single condolence that was given to her.

After all, it was Aunt May who really deserved their support. Aunt May hadn’t done anything wrong. Penny hadn’t been able to do anything right.

Uncle Ben had been an administrator at a non-profit that worked to help the homeless in the city. Lots of the people he touched showed up, lots of lives he helped, and Penny realized she would never be the type of person he’d been. She’d never be that selflessly good.

She could try, though.

For a few months, she wished she could go back in time, save Uncle Ben, even at the expense of herself, but eventually she came to realize that he wouldn’t want that for her. She pushed everything she could into being Spider-Woman, even when Mr. Stark took the suit from her.

And even more a few weeks later when he gave it back.

After the Vulture incident, Mr. Stark was spending more time with her. They had a standing lab day every week, on Saturdays, and when Penny looked at her calendar she realized she was going to have to ask for this Saturday off.

Had two whole years really passed since Ben died?

It didn’t feel real. Penny had been in her last year of middle school when he died, and now she was a sophomore in high school. So yeah. It was real.

Aunt May asked for the day off weeks in advance. Penny told Mr. Stark she wasn’t going to be able to come because of a family thing, and he told her to give his regards to her ‘hottie Aunt’. That was never going to stop being weird.

They had Uncle Ben’s favorite breakfast – pancakes, bacon and eggs from this little diner a few streets away from their apartment. They bought two small bouquets of flowers and placed them at his grave, and then Penny and Aunt May went home and they watched old family videos. Uncle Ben and Aunt May at Penny’s parents’ wedding. The one time Uncle Ben got a bonus and they all went to the beach for a long weekend. A bunch of clips from when Penny tried to do her own ‘mockumentary’ of their family after binge-watching The Office.

“Hey,” Penny said, watching the screen with a hollow feeling in her chest. “If… if Uncle Ben were still here, would he be proud of me?”

May pulled her close and hugged Penny tightly. “Of course he would,” she said, and kissed the top of Penny’s head. “He’d be scared shitless, just like I am, but he would be so, so proud. You’re using your gifts to make this world a better place, baby. What’s there to not be proud of about that?”

Penny started crying a little, and she held onto May. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Sometimes, though, it feels like I’m not doing enough. Like, no matter how much time I spend on the streets, no matter how many car thieves or muggers or drug dealers I stop there’s always more. The Daily Bugle says I’m a menace and I need to be stopped.”

“The Daily Bugle isn’t worth the bandwidth the site uses to say hello,” Aunt May said, rubbing Penny’s back. “And baby, you routinely put yourself at risk to help other people. How many times have I had to get on you to do stuff that isn’t superhero-related, like spend time with Ned and MJ? Penny, if you’re not doing enough no one is. I don’t know where this impossible standard is coming from, but you’re allowed to have a life while you’re saving the world. No one is all hero, all the time. Not even Tony Stark.”

Penny frowned when May said Mr. Stark’s name. Maybe that was part of it. Maybe she was feeling a little guilty because she was starting to see Mr. Stark as more than a mentor figure and it scared her, because she still visited the graves of her father, her grandfather and her uncle.

“I guess you’re right,” Penny said, still curled up in Aunt May’s lap. There was a lot for her to think about, and she didn’t really want to be alone right now. “Can we make popcorn? Maybe watch one of his favorite movies?”

“Of course, Pen,” May said, and pulled up Ghostbusters on the TV.

They’d seen it a million times. It was a Halloween staple, and Uncle Ben used to tell her about how he saw it in theaters with her dad. How they loved it so much they went to see it five times that summer.

It was nice to see it again.


	20. Toto, I Have The Feeling We're Not In Kansas Anymore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lost

People were running around Penny and she was lost.

Penny was eight years old, turning nine in two days, and she was with her Aunt May and Uncle Ben at the Stark Expo 2010. It was a really great birthday present, and Penny had been waiting for this for so long! She had Iron Man posters on all her bedroom walls and she had an Iron Man lunchbox and Iron Man notebooks and now, because of her birthday, she had an Iron Man mask and Iron Man light-up gloves that looked just like his repulsors.

It had been an amazing day at the Expo! There were all of these really cool displays and they were all interactive and they showed the future of what technology was going to look like. Penny already liked taking things apart and putting them back together, and there was a special kid’s area where she got to build a small robot and take her home. Penny was going to name the robot ‘Rosie’, after an old cartoon Uncle Ben liked.

It was dark during the last presentation of the day, which would have been too late for Penny normally, but Aunt May and Uncle Ben agreed they could stay and see it as a favor to the soon-to-be birthday girl. It wasn’t by Mr. Stark, which was a disappointment, but Penny still thought robots were really cool, and she was really excited to see what the future of robots was going to be.

But then there were these loud, booming noises and the giant robot things at the presentation they were watching started attacking the crowd, and Penny got separated from her aunt and her uncle. There were these chunks falling on the crowd and there were so many people running around and it was making Penny dizzy, trying to figure out what to do and where to go.

But it was going to be okay, because she wasn’t just Penny, a tiny asthmatic girl who could barely do the monkey bars at recess. Penny was Iron Penny, and she was a superhero!

One of those mean robots came up to Penny, but it was okay. Even as it raised its guns at her, she wasn’t scared. She was brave! She raised her own gloves, like the lights attached to her hands would do anything to the robots easily three times her size. Penny heard the sounds of the robot preparing to fire, but in the background, she heard the sound of Iron Man just before he touched down in front of her and raised his own guns at the scary robot.

Iron Man blew the robot away before he turned to her and said “Nice work, kid”, and Penny didn’t even get the chance to do much other than stare as he took back off again.

She wanted to do that. Maybe she wouldn’t fly the way Iron Man did, but she watched him fly off with stars in her eyes. Penny wanted to be a hero like him one day, she wanted to save people the way he saved her, and she wanted to thank him for blasting the robot like he did. All of it was so, so cool, and she knew that no one at school would ever believe her, but it didn’t matter because Penny knew the truth.

Iron Man had swooped down and saved her and complimented her on her bravery.

Aunt May and Uncle Ben found Penny not too long after, still perfectly fine, and they hugged her as tightly as Penny could ever remember being held by anyone. Uncle Ben carried her out of the arena and they ran for shelter until they got the all-clear from the police that everything was okay and that they could all go home. It was really late by then, and Penny fell asleep in the car ride home, dreaming about superheroes and technology and science.

Penny never lost the sense of awe and wonder for Iron Man after that. She – like the rest of everyone in New York City – huddled in silence and fear as aliens attacked Manhattan a few years later, when she was 12, and then sobbed for days on end when his Malibu mansion was attacked and he was presumed dead for a few days around Christmas the next year.

There weren’t many pieces of merchandise available for girls, but Penny learned how to make her own. She sewed patches onto jackets and grabbed shirts and tank tops from the boys’ section of the store. As the Avengers became better known, her merchandise collection grew to include Captain America shirts and Black Widow comics and Bruce Banner books, but she never forgot the hero who started it all. The hero who saved her when she was a lost little kid who was scared and separated from her parents.

Iron Man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was actually really hard to write. I didn't really have a story I wanted to do for Penny being lost, and I don't have much idea about field medicine, but I have wanted to write Baby Penny at the Stark Expo for a while. Thank you again to everyone who has left kudos or comments -- it means so much to me!


	21. I Don't Feel So Well

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hypothermia

Penny was out patrolling in the middle of winter and she regretted every life choice that brought her to be outside at this very moment.

It was starting to snow and she was getting ready to go home when she heard gunshots.

Gunshots were never good.

Penny, for the life of her, was never going to understand criminal enterprises, but she especially didn’t understand why there was a deal going down tonight. She crawled into the warehouse she heard the gunshots come from, watching closely from the rafters, and watched as a gang leader with an oddly shaped head barked around orders.

There was a gang fight breaking out and Penny didn’t know what to do.

There didn’t appear to be any innocents around, and this wasn’t a fight Penny really wanted to wade into when she was by herself. She decided to just gather information on the main players for the moment, get recordings and profiles for when there was something she could actually do, and then a bullet came too close to her.

She dodged it at exactly the right moment, but the bullet still skimmed her suit. There was a small line of red, but Penny was more concerned with the wires the bullet tore through while she was dodging it.

The way the spider suit worked was that it was an extremely durable fabric that was interwoven with extremely-thin fibers that gave Karen all the information she needed about Penny’s biometrics and her surroundings, as well as the ability to make Penny’s suit do all the things Penny needed it to.

So when Penny high-tailed it out of the warehouse, she asked Karen for a status report.

“Your heater is offline,” Karen said. “At the current air temperature, the rate of snow falling and your personal inability to create enough heat during colder temperatures, I would advise you to find heated shelter within the next 20 minutes. If you don’t, your senses may become too dulled by the cold, and your health will suffer. Should I contact Mr. Stark and have someone come pick you up?”

Penny groaned. They’d just gotten the suit patched up after she took some serious hits taking down Goblin last month and she didn’t need it to be offline again. “No, I should be able to make it to the Tower in that time,” Penny said. “Just get me the fastest route there, okay?”

Karen agreed and charted a line to the Tower for Penny, but Penny included one key bad variable in her decision: she was basing her swinging speed off of what it normally was when she was warm and happy, not when she was caught in what was becoming a blizzard and getting colder. Penny almost lost her grip on her web line several times, and by the time she made it to the Tower, she had been swinging through the oncoming winter storm for an hour – three times the amount of time Karen warned her would be dangerous.

Penny had heard Karen’s repeated warnings, but there wasn’t much the A.I. could do when Penny was determined to get back to the Tower under her own power. By the time Penny got to her entrance, she was exhausted and shaking like a leaf. Her mind was running at .5 miles per hour and her only thought was the nice, soft couch in the next room, with the warm, fluffy throw pillow and blanket set. She liked to take naps there sometimes, and a nap sounded great to her.

Penny never actually made it to the couch. She stumbled and fell after she got into the building, her limbs stiff from the cold and her breathing shallow. Snow that stuck itself to her suit started melting off her, leaving her in a cold puddle on the floor, and she curled up in a tight ball to conserve what little heat she could make on her own.

If she had been at home, with Aunt May, Penny would have been screwed. As it was, she was at the Tower, so when she passed out from hypothermia on the communal floor, Tony was alerted immediately. He raced to her entrance and found her on the floor, pale and soaking wet and barely communicative.

It scared the shit out of him.

“Penny,” Tony yelled, “Penny! Come on, sweetheart, you gotta wake up.”

Penny’s eyes cracked open and Tony sighed in relief, but he knew she wasn’t doing well.

“Mr. Stark,” she whispered, “I don’t feel so well.”

“No shit, really?” Tony asked.

He picked her up carefully and got her to the couch she’d been aiming for when she first came in. Penny, for her part, was very quiet and very still – two words he would never use to describe her, ever – but even so, carrying her was hard on his back.

“Okay, well, I definitely can’t keep doing that,” Tony said. “You are way too big to be carried like that anymore, kid. FRIDAY, grab all of Penny’s vitals and call Helen. I don’t think I need to come all the way back here for this, but I want her opinion anyway.”

FRIDAY displayed the vitals in front of him and called Helen, projecting her image near the vitals.

“What did you just send me, Stark?” Helen asked. “Did something happen to Penny?”

“She was out for way too long in the storm,” Tony replied, looking through her vitals data. “Her temp is about 93 degrees. Does she need professional help, or is this something I can deal with on my own?”

“That’s still just mild hypothermia,” Helen responded. “Get her out of any wet clothes and get her warmed up. If possible, a warm – not hot – bath would be a good idea. You don’t want to shock her system too bad.”

Tony nodded and hit the spider symbol on her chest. The suit fell away from her, and it left behind a mostly still dry pair of long underwear, which Tony had never been more grateful for in his life.

Yes, this was in a purely parental manner, and he was taking the actions he was to make sure she didn’t get sick from being cold too long. There were still parts of his teenage mentee that he didn’t need (or want) to see.

Once the wet clothes were off her, Tony grabbed a couple of the throw blankets from around the room and tucked them around Penny to trap the warmth she could produce around her. Penny instantly relaxed, her face smoothing out even as she kept shivering a little, and Tony finally felt secure enough to go to the kitchen and get them both warm drinks. For him, it was decaf, and for her, hot chocolate with star-shaped mini-marshmallows.

It took a while for Penny to come back to him, and by the time she was able to sit up and drink her hot chocolate, it cooled a fair amount. Tony put it in the microwave to heat it back up and Penny took the cup gratefully, still burrowed into her pile of blankets.

“Don’t scare me like that again, Underoos,” Tony chided. “Did you forget I have a heart condition? I can’t have teenagers just pass out in my Tower every day. It’s not good for me.”

“I thought this Tower was only 12 percent yours,” Penny said, sipping her hot chocolate. It was lovely and balanced with spices, the way she liked it. “Pepper said an argument could be made for 15.”

Tony was surprised Pepper told her about that, but he smiled and laughed anyway. “You, young lady, have been spending way too much time with Pepper,” he said. “You need to be spending more time with me, building things, and less time learning world domination from her. How about for our first new project we fix the suit and find a few backup systems in case this happens again?”

Penny nodded and kept sipping her hot chocolate. Tony got up to get a refill on his decaf and stopped to pat her on her blanket-buried shoulder.

“Seriously, kid,” he said, “don’t do this again. I can always send a suit out to get you. I’d rather come pick you up than have you freeze to death trying to get home.”

Penny nodded, unsure of what to say to that, and Tony went to get his refill.

Everything was going to be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a cold wimp. I fucking hate the cold.
> 
> This story was inspired by my deep and abiding hatred of being cold.


	22. Do These Tacos Taste Funny To You?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poisoned

Team meetings were always a huge, involved thing. They didn’t always mean there was going to be a mission, but it did mean they were going to have to listen to updates about global security and there was going to be a presentation about world issues that could rise to the level of a threat the Avengers might be called in about.

Penny didn’t like those parts. They didn’t really help her any. She was a high school student and she was not really involved in any major international conflicts. She mostly stayed home in New York and helped make sure the local brigade of scientist supervillains didn’t get too out of hand and destroy one of the boroughs.

Her favorite parts were the meals after. If they were all going to be stuck in presentations for hours, Mr. Stark insisted they always get food after, and somehow he knew all of the **best** places. It wasn’t just limited to fancy food, either – the pizza was always amazing, if they got it delivered, and if it wasn’t pizza it was burgers or, like tonight, tacos.

Penny immediately rushed to the taco bar that was set up outside the meeting room as soon as the presentation was done and made herself four tacos to start. The older Avengers were still gathered in the meeting room, but the presentation had gone on past lunch and Penny was genuinely starving. She’d left the apartment later than she intended, so she didn’t really get breakfast before, and with her metabolism Penny couldn’t afford to skip meals that often.

The tacos were amazing. Penny ignored all of the others and absolutely destroyed one of the tacos immediately, enjoying the rich flavors and the textures involved, but after she ate the first one she started feeling bad.

Like, really bad.

Like, her stomach started cramping bad.

“Whoa, kid, you okay?” Tony said, and all the conversation stopped. Penny shook her head as she started feeling incredibly nauseous and ran into the kitchenette to lose what little she’d eaten in the trash can.

“Is she sick?” Sam asked, but Natasha turned to the now-abandoned plate of tacos and grabbed a sample of some of the sauce.

“Take this to the lab and test it,” she told Bruce, and he went off.

After that, no one else touched the tacos. Penny eventually got to the point where there was nothing left for her to threw up, but that didn’t help her – she was still feeling horribly. Steve got her a glass of water and she washed the acidic taste out of her mouth.

“How about you go lie down on the couch, kiddo,” Tony offered softly, looking sad and a little guilty. “Helen is on her way here. She was giving a lecture at a med school.”

Penny nodded and curled up on the couch, using Mr. Stark’s lap as a pillow (with an extra pillow between them). It felt like there were knives in her stomach and she couldn’t help but cry a little from the pain.

Tony, for his part, was an excellent pillow. He kept carding his hand through her hair, and it helped her calm down and relax a little, even with the pain.

“It’s gonna be okay, kiddo,” Tony said, and it was with such tenderness that Penny almost believed him. “Just keep talking to me, Pen. How bad is it? Where are you at now?”

“About an 8?” Penny whimpered. “I’ve been stabbed and it hurt less, but I’ve been shot and that hurt more. Not much more, though. This sucks pretty bad.”

“Yeah, I would bet,” Tony said. “The arc reactor almost killed me back in 2010. The palladium in the reactor was poisoning me.”

“That’s not still an issue, right?” Penny asked, and Tony laughed a little.

“Nah, kid,” he said. “The only one being poisoned right now is you.”

Penny had started cramping up hard by the time Bruce came back with the results. There was a massive dose of arsenic in the tacos, and they weren’t sure how much Penny had had in her one taco, but they had the ability to help reverse the effects of the poison through chelation therapy, which would remove the element from her bloodstream and stop the worst effects of the poisoning. Helen was getting the IV set up now.

Penny tried to stand up to walk into MedBay but fell almost immediately. Tony caught her with Steve, panic crossing both of their faces, and together they helped walk her into MedBay. Natasha, for her part, stole out of the room to go talk to the business that they’d ordered the tacos from.

Getting chelation therapy wasn’t fun. Not too long after the treatment started, there was a burning sensation in Penny’s arm. When she spoke up about it, Dr. Cho said it was a common side effect of the therapy, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it.

Then came the massive headache.

Penny started crying again, unable to get away from the pounding in her head. Crying made the headache worse, but she couldn’t stop it, and worse yet – the other Avengers noticed she was crying.

“Does something else hurt?” Tony asked, alarmed. “Penny, what’s wrong?”

“My head,” Penny whispered. “I can’t – my head, it really hurts, I can’t –”

Tony looked to Helen, but she shook her head. “I’m hesitant to give her anything else until we get through with the chelation therapy,” Helen said. “I don’t want the treatment to become less effective or worse, interact with any headache medication we might give her.”

“So there’s nothing else we can do for her?” Tony asked. “The poor kid’s in agony. I’ve seen her come home with stab wounds and fewer tears.”

Helen shook her head regretfully and Tony sighed.

“Thanks anyway, doc,” he said, and went back to sit at Penny’s bedside. “What else tends to help when you have headaches?”

Penny blanked for a minute. “I… turning out the lights?” she said, trying to think. “No sound. A warm blanket. Really, I just try to trick myself into taking a nap, but I’m – I don’t think I can nap right now, sir.”

“Well, we can still turn down the lights and make it quieter in here,” Tony said, “and Bruce can get you a throw blanket or something, can’t you, Bruce?”

Bruce heard the suggestion for what it was and left Tony, Penny and Helen alone in the room after fetching said blanket and turning down the lights. Steve had already gone to brief Nick Fury about the attempt on the team’s life, and Rhodey was out getting something different for the team to eat. Tony didn’t know what and he didn’t care, because Penny came first.

Penny was right. She didn’t get a chance to fall asleep during the therapy, or even for a decent amount of time after the IV ended. But when she did, Tony was still sitting there next to her, making sure she was alright.

And she was going to be alright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact! I actually went with Peter's canonical spider-sense weakness here. Peter can only sense a threat if he knows it's a threat. For example, one time in the comics Aunt May (who didn't know he was Spider-Man) drew a gun on him because JJ at the Daily Bugle kept printing articles about how dangerous Spider-Man was. Peter had no idea Aunt May was packing heat until after she drew the gun.
> 
> As always, thank you to everyone who has left kudos or comments -- they really do help me keep writing. If there's anything you really want to see more of, please feel free to let me know!


	23. What's a Whumpee Got to Do to Get Some Sleep Around Here?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exhaustion

Balancing school, being a superhero and AcaDec was hard, but Penny figured out a way to do it. It was a fragile balance, and it took a lot of work, but she was usually home by midnight and she did her homework before she went out patrolling. She made it happen.

The balance started to fall, though, when construction started going on in the building next to theirs.

Penny had super senses. It was a blessing and a curse. It meant that she had information faster, and that she could feel when things were wrong, but it also meant that when the construction crews were doing night work there was almost no way she could get any sleep.

Not getting any sleep meant it was harder for her to focus both in school and on patrols, which meant an uptick in minor injuries. Mr. Stark wasn’t happy about that.

Then the building next door was imploded, because it was structurally unsound, and the sound of the building coming down made its way into her nightmares.

Now the little sleep she was able to steal didn’t even do her the favor of being restful. Penny became more and more zombie-like, even as the crews started cleaning up the site during the day.

“Yo, loser,” MJ said, hitting Penny lightly on the head with her sketchbook. “Wake up. You’ve been staring into space for like, half an hour, and the bell just rang.”

Penny blinked and remembered where she was. Fourth period U.S. History. “Right, sorry,” she said, and started gathering up her books and heading out the door. “Thanks for letting me know.”

MJ rolled her eyes. “Do you want to come over?”

MJ never offered to let anyone see her house. From what Penny could tell, MJ didn’t have a great home life, but she never talked about it at school. “What… like a sleepover?”

“I dunno, maybe?” MJ said, looking a lot less sure of herself than she normally did. “Listen, I don’t want to have to put up with Flash on our team, and I’m going to have to call him in as a replacement if it looks like you’re going to fall asleep in the middle of Districts next week. We can get some studying done and you can be away from the construction crew from hell.”

“Okay,” Penny said. The explanation made about as much sense as anything else in her life. “So… Friday? I just go home with you after school?”

“Yeah,” MJ said, trying to go back to looking unbothered again. “Unless you have lab with Stark again?”

Penny shook her head. “He’s in Dubai this week,” she said.

MJ nodded. “Makes sense that the unethical billionaire would hang out in a human rights abuse hotspot,” she said. “Anyway, my parents won’t be home either, so we’ll have the space to ourselves.”

“Sounds good,” Penny said, and that’s where she and MJ had different schedules. Penny had to go to Spanish, whereas MJ had figure drawing.

It was just a normal sleepover, right?

So why were there butterflies in Penny’s stomach?

Penny got permission from Aunt May to stay over at MJ’s house – and Aunt May was thrilled that Penny was doing something normal teenage girls did over doing something related to Spider-Woman. The fact that Penny was going to be away from the construction crew was even better. Aunt May knew how the demolition had impacted Penny’s sleep.

The next day at school, Penny brought the stuff she would need for a sleepover to school in her backpack. She’d gotten a little more sleep, but not much, so she was still spacing out in history class.

MJ met her at the end of the day.

“So, how do we get to your place?” Penny asked, feeling more awake than she had when Mr. Sherman was talking about the Civil War. “Do we take a bus?”

“Yeah, but first we take the train,” MJ said, and led her to the subway station near their school. Penny took this route too, but in the opposite direction, which was probably why she hadn’t seen MJ on the platform that much.

There was barely any room on the train, even when Penny took her backpack off and moved closer to MJ. They got off five stops later, and then MJ led them to a bus station, where they waited for about 20 minutes before they got picked up and dropped off a few blocks from MJ’s place.

“That was… what, an hour of travel?” Penny asked. “What time do you have to get up in order to make it to school?”

“Oh, I have to be up at 5 to be out the door by 5:30 at latest,” MJ said. “It’s even worse during the morning rush hour. I have to give myself some time as a buffer in case I miss a train because it’s too full.”

Penny lived closer to the school than MJ did, and even if she missed the train she could web-swing to school. For a second, she felt bad for her friend.

“I don’t mind getting up that early,” MJ continued. “I get to sketch a lot of people who are pre-coffee and absolutely hate their lives. It’s pretty funny.”

Well, never mind then.

MJ’s place seemed mostly normal, if a little older. She lived in a fourth-floor walkup apartment, and her neighborhood seemed alright, if a little dingy, but that described a good chunk of New York City. Her room was even pretty normal, especially considering it was MJ – there were sketches and there were a couple of beanbag chairs on the floor and there was this really cool old lamp in the corner that had stained glass, so there were patterns of different colored lights on the wall and floor.

“I like to thrift a lot,” MJ said, seeming a little embarrassed, and Penny understood. Not many teenagers really ‘liked’ thrifting, especially at their school.

“It’s really cool!” Penny said, smiling. “My aunt does a lot of thrifting too, so our apartment looks like a hippie paradise. You should come over sometime.”

MJ relaxed a little and put her bookbag down. “I can get us something, if you’re hungry,” she offered. “We have chips? And water or soda, if you’re thirsty.”

“Water, please?” Penny asked. The battle to stay hydrated was almost as hard as it was to stay fed. “And yeah, some chips would be cool.”

MJ went to get the stuff and Penny couldn’t help but look around. All of her books looked like they’d been bought from library book sales or thrift stores, and most of them looked pretty well-worn. There was a clearly-loved copy of The Little Red Book, as well as The Communist Manifesto and The Anarchist’s Cookbook.

Well then.

“Alright, loser,” MJ said, when she came back into the room, “now that we have food, do we want to numb our brains with homework or go over AcaDec questions?”

“Homework?” Penny suggested. “There’s a test in English next week and I haven’t finished the worksheets Mr. Miranda gave us.”

“That’s cause you keep falling asleep during the videos he shows us,” MJ said. “Stop doing that.”

Penny rolled her eyes, but she was so much more aware of herself and MJ in this space and she realized MJ was being serious. MJ was trying to look out for her. MJ was actually concerned.

And Penny was… blushing?

Because if MJ actually cared about her… and she cared about MJ…

Penny told herself to stop being such a disaster. She’d already scared Liz off with her attempts to be romantic. She didn’t need to drag MJ into this and she didn’t need to ruin a good friendship while she was at it.

They got homework done. They got AcaDec prep done. They watched shitty YouTube videos and TikToks and even tried to do a few together. MJ sketched Penny while they were watching a movie together, Booksmart, and MJ’s bed was big enough that she said Penny and her could sleep in it together, instead of Penny taking the couch.

And even though it was perfectly innocent – Penny was at one end of the bed, MJ at another, multiple blankets in between them – Penny couldn’t help the butterflies in her stomach as she fell asleep.

It was the best sleep she’d had in months.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Going to a sleepover as a queer teenage girl is hard, okay? I didn't tell my best friend I had a crush on her until after we graduated high school because I was terrified I was only catching feels for her because the sleepovers were my only source of peace in high school.
> 
> We never got together, but we're still really good friends.
> 
> As always, thank you to the people who leave kudos and comments!


	24. You're Not Making Any Sense

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sensory Deprivation

Penny woke up in a weird pod.

It was smooth, and the water was warm without being too hot. Everything was dark, and Penny couldn’t hear anything outside of the water moving when she did.

The only thing she could smell was herself, and there were scents like she’d been in a hard fight and lost. Blood and burnt fabric. Penny reached up to get out of her pod and…

Couldn’t get out.

She couldn’t get out.

Penny tried to sit up, but there wasn’t enough room to. She felt around the corners of the pod and there weren’t any seams or any release latches that would let her out.

She was trapped.

Oh God, she was trapped.

Her claustrophobia took over and she started hyperventilating. Penny was trapped somewhere dark, she was alone and this time there wasn’t even any rubble she could push off herself. This was a literal fucking nightmare and she sobbed as she broke down, unable to control it.

Penny hyperventilated so hard that she passed out, and when she woke up, she was still in the same space. She wanted to hyperventilate again, but the last time left her exhausted and weak.

As Penny just floated in the pod, she became aware of other parts of being in the pod. She couldn’t hear or smell or see or touch anything that wasn’t a part of it.

On bad days Penny couldn’t get away from her senses. She could hear her teacher and the two teachers in the rooms on either side of the classroom. She could hear the car backfire outside the school. She could smell the dry-erase marker the teacher used to write on the board and she could feel Ned’s pencil tapping on the desk behind her. It had been this way since she got the spider-bite, and it was something she’d learned to live with as best she could.

In this pod, for the first time in years, Penny was alone.

She couldn’t hear whoever put her in this thing. She couldn’t smell their deodorant or feel their footsteps or even sense if she was in danger. Penny was just floating, just existing.

Being alone with her thoughts was sometimes dangerous. Penny’s mind wasn’t always a safe place for her, and now was no different. Was she missing a battle? How had she gotten here? Who put her into this place? What was going on?

Penny started crying. She didn’t like being alone. She didn’t like being in here. If this was supposed to be torture, it was working. It was laying bare all of her fears and her insecurities, and if a villain was watching this, they knew how to break her and how quickly she would break.

Penny started pounding on the top of the pod, trying to see if she could use her strength to break out of the pod, but it wasn’t any use – she couldn’t get her hand far back enough to do anything but push on the container’s top with any real force.

She wasn’t even wearing her mask, so she couldn’t talk to Karen or make a call out of this horrible place or listen to music while she was in there.

Penny didn’t know how long it was until the team found her. She was starving and slightly delirious, and when the pod opened she didn’t believe it at first. She didn’t even believe the pod was open. Penny had been running through books she used to read, homework she needed to do, errands she needed to run and the pros and cons of staying in the city versus leaving the city for college.

Tony got out of the Iron Man armor and pulled her into sitting up, at which point something clicked in her brain, because every other time she tried to sit up there was pain. “Mr. Stark?” Penny whispered, and her teammates’ faces crinkled in sympathy with how broken and hoarse her voice sounded.

“Yeah, kiddo,” Tony said, and held her close in a firm, slightly desperate hug. “We got you.”

Other sensations started coming back. Black Widow had a specific leather treatment she used on her suit to make sure it stayed clean and in good condition, even with the amount of blood she normally spilled. Tony’s aftershave. The way Hulk’s breathing sounded, and the way Clint’s hearing aides buzzed slightly. Thor took off his cloak to wrap her in, since she was still soaking wet, and she’d never felt anything so soft or so warm.

And the way it sounded when Captain America cleared his throat.

“Come on, team,” he said, getting everyone’s attention again. “Now that we have Spider-Woman back, we need to get out of here. I know we’re going to burn this place to the ground but before that, we need to leave the premises.”

“Aww, Cap,” Penny said, her voice still rough. “Arson on my behalf? I didn’t know you cared.”

“Where did you get that idea?” Clint responded, clearly joking. “It’s been ages since we got to burn something down. This was clearly just perfect timing.”

“Clearly,” Penny agreed, but she was still touched.

It was a little hard for Penny to walk again, but nothing was wrong with her legs – she just needed to focus on using them. She wasn’t going fast enough, though, so Thor picked her up to carry her as the rest of the Avengers went ahead to clear the path for them.

“You were sorely missed, little Spider,” Thor said. “The team didn’t rest until they found you.”

“How… how long was I gone?” Penny said, blinking. As soon as they left the room, she was overwhelmed by the lights overhead, and the heavy sound of doors sliding open before Thor walked through them. “I can’t remember anything about how I got here.”

“You were hit by a tranquilizer dart last night,” Thor said, his expression showing a quiet rage Penny knew wasn’t directed at her. “Your last act was to let us know you’d been hit. You were scouting out a hallway for the team. By the time we got to where you’d been when you were hit, you were already gone.”

Well, that explained a lot about how the enemy was able to get her in a pod like that in the first place.

“My mask!” Penny remembered. “The enemy – they’ve seen my face.”

“I believe your father took care of digital records,” Thor said, “and Widow took care of the rest.”

Penny relaxed, even though she knew “took care of the rest” probably meant “murdered them in horrible ways”. For some reason, Penny wasn’t feeling that charitable to the bad guys.

Thor got them both to the jet and Black Widow handed Penny a change of clothing. When she dried off and got into the sweats and long-sleeved shirt combo, Penny came back to the others and gave everyone a hug, including Mr. Stark.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” she whispered, and Tony squeezed her a little harder.

“You know we always will,” he said, and kissed the top of her head. “You know it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to everyone who has left comments or kudos! It means the world to me.


	25. I Think I'll Collapse Right Here, Thanks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Disorientation, Blurred Vision, Ringing Ears

Penny loved Mythbusters as a kid.

She loved the science and how well it was explained. She loved the rational progress of scientific thought the show demonstrated. She loved the real-world applications of the experiments and how they always revolved around a popular story or issue or idea, and how those ideas were either rated plausible, confirmed or busted. She loved seeing what happened to all the different iterations of Buster, the poor crash-test test dummy that ended up getting blown up, dropped from planes, shot at and went through other horrible experiences in the name of getting results.

What she loved best, though, were the explosions. Those never stopped being cool.

Until she was involved in a possibly explosive situation, that was.

As it turned out, the bank robbers she was stopping figured they wouldn’t be able to bully their way into the safe, so they brought explosives. Penny had knocked out the criminals and gotten most of the people out in time, but there were a few stragglers in the offices that Penny and the law enforcement that showed up were trying to get out before the bomb finished counting down.

Meanwhile, there was a bomb squad on the scene trying to dismantle the bomb, but from what Penny heard, they weren’t having much success. They were trying to dismantle it through a robot, which Penny thought was really cool, but when she saw the robot something gave her pause.

It wasn’t Stark Industries – she would have recognized the design.

It was Hammer Industries.

That didn’t mean it was absolutely doomed, but it did mean she was a lot more nervous about the bot than she was five seconds ago. Penny grabbed a few more stragglers and ushered them out the door, and she went back for one more sweep when –

The explosion was massive. It shook the building to its core, and the rush of fire filled the entire lobby. The shockwave from the explosive caught Penny off guard and slammed her through a support beam.

When she came to, the room was still on fire and there was heavy black smoke in the air. Penny stood up shakily and looked around, trying to get her surroundings, and saw the last few people in the bank (and the police officers who had been escorting them out) were dead.

That hurt. As much as Penny believed all cops were bad, and as much as they had proven it over and over again with miscarriages of justice and attempts to serve her with arrest warrants for crimes committed by her enemies, that didn’t mean she wanted them dead. Just doing different jobs, like being security guards or actually helping people.

Penny’s head was fuzzy and her ears were ringing. She blinked her eyes once, twice and realized her vision was off – either a result of the head trauma or the smoke in the air, she couldn’t immediately tell.

“Penny,” Karen said, “the building is unstable and on fire. You need to get out. There is an incoming call from Mr. Stark.”

“Answer it,” she said, trying to stand up. She was shaky on her feet, but it didn’t feel like she had any open wounds from being yote through a support beam via rapidly expanding gas.

“Spiderling, you okay?” Tony asked, his voice full of concern. “I just got an alert from your suit that you were involved in an explosion and you have a possible concussion.”

“Make that definite concussion,” Penny said, and stumbled out of the wreck. NYPD had their guns raised and in true New Yorker tradition she raised her middle finger at them before shooting a webline to a nearby building. “Oh God, I definitely should not have done that.”

“Should not have done what?” Tony asked, sounding an awful lot like a concerned parent. “Hang tight, Underroos, I’m coming to you.”

Penny wanted to protest but the world was spinning and the ringing in her ears never went away and her vision was still kinda fucked, even with being out of the smoky room. “Okay,” she said, and laid down on the rooftop. “Okay, I’m staying here. Shouldn’t be too hard because I really don’t want to move anymore for a while.”

“Keep talking to me,” Tony commanded. “What happened?”

“Some bank robbers planted a bomb to try to get into a safe,” Penny said, closing her eyes to stop the spinning. “They got caught like half an hour ago, and NYPD and I were evacuating the building. We almost had everyone out when the bomb squad fucked up. They either did something wrong or their bot did, and I think it was the bot, because it was Hammer tech.”

Tony groaned. “That company should have been dissolved when the CEO went to prison, but nooooo, somehow it got to stay open and go through bankruptcy court and refigure its assets and its corporate makeup.”

“I thought they were done endangering me after the Stark Expo,” Penny said. “Or, at least, I hoped it.”

“You were at the Stark Expo?” Tony asked, and he touched down next to her on the roof. He hopped out of the suit and knelt down to check her out. “How old were you?”

“I was almost nine,” Penny said, and ripped her mask off. That made it easier to breathe. “I still remember it. There was a drone that was about to attack me, but you swooped in out of fucking nowhere.”

“…And commended you on your bravery,” Tony finished, looking shocked. “Holy shit, kid, that was you?”

Penny nodded and then groaned. “Wanted to be a superhero after that. Didn’t think I would get the wish this literally, though. Or this many scorch marks.”

Tony chuckled a little. “Comes with the territory, Pen,” he said, and helped her up. “How’re you feeling now?”

“Like a crash test dummy on Mythbusters,” Penny complained. “I have so much more sympathy for Buster than I did an hour ago.”

“Well, let’s get you cleaned up and checked out,” Tony said, getting back into the suit. “Can you still stick to my back or do I need to carry you in my arms?”

“I can stick to your back,” Penny assured him. “I was keeping a conversation, wasn’t I?”

“Uh huh,” Tony said. “Well, last time we tried this you almost got shish-kabobbed by the Empire State Building. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that.”

“Mr. Staaaaaaark!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really loved Mythbusters as a kid. I wish I were better at science and math than I am, but I really did love it.


	26. If You Thought The Head Trauma Was Bad...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Migraine

Morning light didn’t usually feel like stabs of pain digging through Penny’s eyes and into her brain, but when she woke up she could feel that the day was going to be a bad one.

Moving was hard. Getting out of bed was hard. She wanted to just stay curled up and half watch, half listen to an old favorite cartoon at volumes so low she could only hear it because of her enhanced senses. She wanted to bury herself in soft surfaces and maybe, when she was feeling better, make herself some tea with honey to wash away the worst of the symptoms.

Unfortunately, she had to get up and get ready to go to school because Fate was an unkind bitch and there was a massive Chemistry test today. She knew all of the material by heart – Chemistry was one of her best subjects – but it was also the last period of the day and it meant she would have to get through the whole day before the test. She wouldn’t be able to go home until the day was over.

Penny put in the special earbuds Mr. Stark designed for days like today, and she put on a special pair of sunglasses that would filter out most of the light while still letting her see. That, along with a pain pill Dr. Cho and Dr. Banner created together, was the best she could do for herself as she forced herself into scratchy jeans, a tighter-than-usual bra and a science pun shirt.

Penny grabbed a light jacket before she left for the day, her backpack feeling like a million pounds on her back, and she just got to the subway station before her train did. The subway was loud and cramped and there were a million smells that made her want to throw up, including the malt liquor spilling out of the drunk guy’s brown paper bag.

When she got to school, Penny knew MJ and Ned would instantly be able to tell something was wrong, but they both knew about her migraines by this point. Her teachers did too, and so she was able to get through most of the day without being called on.

Even better, the steps she took earlier in the morning did help. The earbuds and sunglasses helped filter out a lot of what would have made everything worse and the pain pill dulled the worse of the pain. Things were going okay for a migraine day.

That was until she got to lunch. The only thing worse than the smells in the cafeteria was the fact that Flash decided to show up and be his usual jackass self.

“Pity Parker,” he said, approaching the table. “Looking even worse than usual, Pity. What, did you finally get into the big kid drinks last night?”

“Fuck **_off_** , Flash,” Penny groaned. “You could literally be anywhere else in the world right now. Why are you right here?”

“Ooo, a little touchy,” Flash laughed. He slammed his hands down on the lunch table and Penny jumped halfway into the air, making him laugh even harder. “God, I almost wish it was a hangover, but everyone knows that Poor Pity Parker is too much of a goody-two-shoes for that.”

“It’s not a hangover,” Ned said. “Stop it and just go away, okay? Penny doesn’t need this today.”

“And I don’t need her throwing off the curve for our Chemistry test,” Flash responded, “so as long as that doesn’t happen, I think we’re okay here.”

He left and went back to his own table, and Penny lowered her head on the cafeteria table. God, less than three minutes of interaction and it was like she’d never even taken the pain pill this morning.

“I’m sorry,” Ned said quietly. “Do you need to go home? I can call May or Mr. Stark for you.”

Penny’s eyes narrowed as she focused on Flash walking away. “Nah,” she said. “Just for that, I’m going to stay and fuck up that curve extra hard. Fuck that guy.”

Ned groaned a little. Dammit. He needed the curve too.

The next few hours were spent in a haze of pain and keeping her head down, but Penny didn’t go home, and she didn’t let Ned make any calls on her behalf. Her head was killing her, and she was pretty sure the auras she was seeing were going to be permanently imprinted on her eyelids, but it didn’t matter. Penny was incredibly stubborn and she wasn’t going to let an asshole just win like that.

Flash looked dismayed when she walked into Chemistry for the last class of the day. The smell of the tea in a classmate’s water bottle was almost enough to make her gag, but Penny sat down at her desk and focused on the test.

Thinking was hard, but the problems were easy. Penny double-checked her numbers when she was done, making sure she hadn’t made any stupid mistakes like forgetting to carry a one or in converting between types of measurement, and then handed her work in.

“Can I go home now?” Penny asked the teacher quietly after she handed in her test. “I’ve had a blinding migraine all day and it’s really, really bad.”

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Bohr said. “I can’t dismiss you before the bell rings. You can lay your head down on your desk until the school day is done, though.”

Penny nodded and went back to her desk, burying her head in her arms. The shrillness of the final bell was even worse than the bells throughout the day that signaled when to change classes, and Penny felt her migraine get that much worse before she forced herself to get her books.

Ned caught up with her. “Penny, you really don’t look good,” he said, frowning. “Call Mr. Stark or Happy. You shouldn’t have to take the subway after a day like today.”

“I don’t want to make them do that,” Penny said. “Their worlds don’t revolve around me. It’s okay. I’ll just go home and use the rest of the day to sleep it off. No going out tonight.”

Ned didn’t look convinced, but he needed to hurry out and catch the bus. Penny went down to the subway station and waited for her train, but the smell in the station was enough to make her throw up in the garbage can.

It was a long ride home, and by the time she was fishing her keys out of her purse, Penny was thoroughly done with the day. With her phone on the lowest light setting, she texted Ned that she was home, texted May that she had a migraine and texted Mr. Stark that she needed more migraine meds.

Then she passed out, exhausted from trying to get through the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't suffer from migraines, but I have a lot of friends who do, and I wrote this from years of watching them try to deal with things like work and school while having migraines. I'm so sorry there aren't better accommodations for something like this.
> 
> Also, expect the whump to continue well after Whumptober is done. My anxiety is screaming after what happened today.


	27. Okay, Who Had Natural Disasters On Their 2020 Bingo Card?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Extreme Weather, Power Outage

God, the summer was far, far too hot for Penny to still be doing this.

Penny was doing her best to help her area out. It was more than 100 degrees, an extreme temperature, during the middle of a heat wave that was threatening the entire city. Rolling brownouts were ravaging the most vulnerable in their homes, including the elderly and the sick, and the homeless were getting baked by being out too long.

To the city’s credit, they were opening emergency shelters with water and air conditioning and backup generated power, and they were sending city buses to pick people up off the street. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, and the Avengers were busting their ass checking on people, bringing water and critical supplies and getting people to shelters.

“Spider-Woman,” Sam’s voice said, coming through her systems, “Spider-Woman, check in. How are you doing?”

“Getting a little lightheaded,” she said, as finished bringing someone to a shelter. “I think it’s time for a food and water break.”

“Good call,” Sam said, and Penny marveled at how far his Captain voice had come. In the beginning, he was less sure of his place, but now he called the shots just as confidently as Steve ever had. “Get yourself taken care of and come back to base for an actual break. You’ve been out there all morning, Spidey; if you keep going at this rate you’re going to pass out mid-swing.”

“I know, I know,” Penny replied, rolling her eyes in her mask. “Last thing anyone needs is more people to take care of right now. I’ll send you a picture of my food after I get it.”

Sam chuckled. “Only if you’re bringing me back some,” he said, and the line went dead.

Penny picked up a couple of sandwiches for them both – perfect for a long hot day – and a few drinks that weren’t water and hopped on a train back to headquarters. It was too hot and she’d used too much energy to make swinging there feel practical, so a bunch of her fellow New Yorkers got to take pictures and make TikToks of her on the A train.

Half an hour later she was back with the Avengers and she and Sam both had their food. Penny was directed to recharge inside a shelter, to take some time and relax, but it felt wrong.

Sam saw her hesitance and pointed to the gym.

“Go,” he said. “You need to give your muscles a break. We’re all taking shifts; right now the regular humans on the team are going out for their second round of the day. You’re not the only super I called back in. Barnes should be here any time now, same with Nat.”

Bucky got to the relief center then, and Penny rolled her eyes before heading in to listen to some music and cool down for a few minutes.

Tony wasn’t in the relief efforts, and with good reason – his heart problems meant heat waves could be dangerous for him. Instead, he and Pepper were directing corporate and government resources to the places where they would do the most good and organizing volunteers to check on their neighbors.

After an hour, Penny and the others were sent back into the field.

These days were getting more common. This wasn’t the first time Penny and the Avengers had done this work this summer and it scared Penny. Heatwaves used to be a very rare thing, something that would only happen once a decade or so. Now, there were multiple heatwaves in a summer, and the way New York City was set up only made it worse. Because of all the asphalt running through the city, temperatures were even higher than they should have been.

A few more hours of grueling work passed before the sun started to go down and the team regrouped. Sam ordered pizza for them all, but Penny was so tired she could barely eat.

“Well, that’s not good,” Sam said, coming over to check on her. “Usually you’re a human garbage dump. You get a little too fried out there, Spidey?”

“Probably,” Penny admitted. Her mask was shoved up past her nose so she could eat, but she took it all the way off and Sam frowned.

“Yeah, you’re definitely looking rough, kid,” he said, and grabbed a wet rag for her forehead. “You’re done for the rest of the night. Finish your food and hit the showers, Pen. You did good work today.”

Penny nodded, which almost made the rag fall off her forehead, and finishing the pizza she’d been nibbling on. The shower helped unlock sore muscles all over, and when she went back downstairs, she found out that Tony had sent an entire truckload of ice cream for the group.

He even remembered her favorite flavor, chocolate chip cookie dough, and included sundae-making supplies in the order.

Penny made a giant sundae for herself and hopped on FaceTime to video chat with Tony. He smiled and turned the camera so Morgan and Pepper could see Penny too.

“Hey, ‘Roos,” Tony said, smiling. “How’re you holding up? Not going too hard, right?”

“Daaaad,” Penny responded, grinning even as she rolled her eyes. “You’re asking me like you don’t have a tab open with my vitals on your StarkPad right now.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Tony said, smiling. “Anyway, you have to set a good example for Morgan. Right, Momo?”

“Right!” Morgan chirped, and grabbed the tablet from Tony. “Hiiiii, Penny! Today Daddy and I made stuff explode!”

“Baking soda and vinegar,” Tony rushed to assure Penny. “Nothing with fire.”

Pepper rolled her eyes in the background and Penny couldn’t help but laugh a little. “I want you to know if you wanted me to not teach my little sister to make things explode you probably should have said something a lot sooner than you did.”

Tony raised an eyebrow at that and Pepper groaned. “Great, there’s three of them,” she said, and came to join Tony and Morgan on the couch. “How was your day, though? We’ve been trying to help as much as we can from here.”

Penny turned serious, setting the bowl of ice cream in her lap. “It’s… pretty rough. A lot of people needed help. There were a lot of people who couldn’t leave their homes because their home was in a high-rise and the blackout killed the elevator. I started bringing people down by attaching them to my back with webbing.”

“Good thinking,” Tony said, and his brow crinkled in sympathy. “We’re pulling all the strings we can from here. Oh – hey, you guys got the ice cream! Good.”

“Oh, we’ve fallen on it like a bunch of piranhas,” Penny said. “I don’t think any is surviving the night.”

Tony shrugged. “It’s a reward for making it through the day,” he said, and Morgan tugged on his shirt.

“Can I have a juice pop?” she asked.

“No,” Pepper said. “You already had two today.”

“Awww,” Morgan whined, and Tony grinned.

“That’s my cue to get this little one to bed,” he said. “Hey – Penny, stay in touch, okay? If there’s anything you or May or the group need, let me know.”

Penny groaned. “I haven’t even spoken to May all day,” she said. “She’s been pulling triples at the hospital.”

“Well, hopefully you can catch her before you go to sleep,” Pepper said. “We’ll let you go. Bye, sweetie!”

Penny waved at the camera until Tony hung up the call and then dialed Aunt May’s number. It went to voicemail – a sign that May was probably asleep – and Penny left her a message before going to grab another bowl of ice cream.

It was hard work, but they were doing good, and that was what Penny was focusing on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've lived through a couple of heatwaves without air conditioning at this point. I don't like them.


	28. Such Wow. Many Normal. Very Oops.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Accidents

A car accident was never a good thing, but a car accident on a bridge was even worse.

Penny swung to the scene of the accident. Because of the nature of a car accident on a bridge, it was harder for emergency crews to get to them. Even using alternate ways to get there, like emergency lanes, they still had to get to the bridge to use them, and the road was backed up a mile before the bridge even started.

Because of that, Penny was often a first responder.

Today’s car accident was a pretty serious one. A small car had cut off a semi-truck, who didn’t have enough time to brake or enough room to swerve. The small car got crushed between the truck and the SUV in front of the small car, and the SUV had swerved when it was hit, taking out another vehicle when it hit the sedan in the next lane.

Penny went worst to least-worst. The small car was crumpled into a fraction of its original size, and it wasn’t that big to begin with. Penny checked the driver’s seat and found the woman was beyond saving – and a cracked cell phone on the dashboard.

She would never know why the smaller car swerved in front of the semi, but Penny hoped the woman didn’t cause her own death by answering a text while she was driving.

The sedan was pretty bad off as well. The SUV almost T-boned the smaller vehicle, and when Penny got there, she was greeted with thankful tears from the inhabitants.

“Oh my god, Spider-Woman!” The man in the front seat said, breathing easier. “Oh my god. Please, get the kids out of here before you get me. Mary is the kid in the car seat, James is the older one.”

“Are any of you hurt?” Penny asked, and the dad shook his head.

“I think we’re all mostly fine for the moment,” he said, “if a little banged up. I can’t get out, though, and neither can they. My door is partially bashed in and the child safety locks aren’t opening.”

Penny nodded and grabbed the door handle, ripping it off its hinges. The kids in the back seat laughed, and she smiled as she did it again for their dad.

“Thank you, Spider-Woman,” the dad said and hugged her tightly. “Thanks. I’m going to see if I can’t get the kids to a safer place and get them checked out before I call my insurance.”

Penny nodded and turned back to the others involved in the accident. The semi-truck driver seemed to be the best off, so Penny went to the SUV to check on how it was doing. “You peeps need any help?” she asked, looked in through the shattered back window. “Everyone okay in there?”

There were a couple of groans. When Penny looked in, she saw a bunch of college kids in there. They looked mostly dazed and the driver’s side airbag had deployed and deflated.

“Aww man,” she said, “my dad is going to kill me. I wasn’t supposed to take this car, but there were a bunch of us and it was cheaper this way.”

“Can’t help you there,” Penny replied, “but I can get you and your friends out of the car. Anyone stuck?”

“I don’t think so,” said the girl in the front passenger’s seat. “We just weren’t sure what to do or if it was safe to get out.”

“It’s safe,” Penny said, and the girls piled out of the rear-ended SUV. “Emergency crews should be here soon, but the traffic means they haven’t been able to get onto the bridge yet.”

When Penny checked on the semi-truck dude, he was on the side of the road looking mostly fine and on the phone with someone who sounded like his boss. Penny decided to let him be and start directing traffic – the sooner emergency crews got on the bridge, the sooner cleanup could happen and the people involved in the accident could get checked out.

The cops didn’t like Penny but the fire department did. With Penny’s help traffic started moving a little faster, which meant emergency crews got on the bridge faster. Penny waved hi to the firefighters when she saw them and swung away, more than ready to let the professionals take over what she started.

Penny was about to take a break and grab something to eat when Karen piped up. “Doc Ock has been spotted in upper Manhattan, near Columbia University. Some of the students reported he was breaking into the chemistry labs when they saw him.”

Well, that was her break delayed Penny groaned and asked Karen to get her there as fast as possible. Anything Doc Ock was up to was guaranteed to be painful for Penny in the long run, and she wanted to head this off as soon as she could and get him back in police custody.

Penny had just gotten onto campus when she heard the sounds of an explosion from the chemistry building and she swung there as fast as possible. There was smoke pouring out of one of the windows and Doc Ock emerged, carrying a bag with him. Penny started chasing him since campus emergency crews were already on scene.

“Hey, Ock, get back here!” Penny shouted, trying to tug the bag away from him with a web line. “You’ve got something that doesn’t belong to you and I bet the university wants it back!”

“Those fools didn’t know how to use it the right way,” Ock shouted back. Penny noticed he was limping and out of breath. “I do! My research will reach incredible heights; their research would barely have gotten off the ground!”

Penny groaned and rolled her eyes. “Oh my god,” she said, “this is why everyone hates academia. Jesus Christ. What, did they get something around the Terrorist Watch List Ban?”

“As a matter of fact, they did,” Ock replied. “I have waited years to do this experiment, Spider-Woman; you won’t stop me from doing it now!”

He threw a satellite dish at her and escaped past where she could see him. Sighing, Penny went back to campus to see if she could learn more about what he grabbed and what it could be used for. If she could at least figure that out, she could make plans and maybe even tweak her suit to better handle whatever he was going to throw at her.

An hour of info-gathering later, Penny finally got her food break from a food truck burrito outside one of the dorms. Superheroing was hungry work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has left comments or kudos! It means a lot to me, really.


	29. I Think I Need a Doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Intubation, Emergency Room

Wanda and Penny were part of a larger response to a magical portal that opened near Broadway. Thor, Hulk, Scarlet Witch and Penny had been the first on the scene, and as they fought, they tried to keep the magical constructs from spilling out and into the larger area. Captain America and the Winter Soldier arrived next, ready to help back them up, and Dr. Strange had just stepped out of his own portal when Penny got stabbed in the chest.

Penny fell and for a moment, everything stopped. Her teammates all heard her cry out with pain and more than a couple turned to see her. Wanda was the first to reach her, and she blocked the constructs from reaching them as she examined the stab wound.

“Oh shit, this is really bad,” Penny said weakly. Wanda wanted to shake her, but instead she turned the magical construct into so much ash and carried Penny to a less dangerous part of the field.

“You think?” Wanda asked, grabbing some large emergency first aid gauze pads from a pocket. “God, Penny, I thought you had a spider-sense or something that kept you from being hurt like this.”

“I do,” Penny said. “I couldn’t get out of the way in time.”

Penny started coughing, and Wanda was not happy to see a small trail of blood dripping down Penny’s cheek.

“Did you bite your tongue when the construct stabbed you?” Wanda asked frantically. “Penny, talk to me!”

“I don’t think so?” Penny said, her voice distant and dazed. “Hey – hey Wanda, it’s getting… really hard to breathe.” Penny coughed a bit more. “There’s an elephant on my chest…”

Wanda didn’t want to lose anyone else in battle. It was bad enough she lost Pietro and then Vision like that – she didn’t think she could bear it if she lost Penny that way too. She put more pressure on the bandage on Penny’s chest and started looking around frantically.

“I think I need a doctor!” Wanda yelled, her voice frantic as she tried to get Penny’s eyes back open. “Come on, Penny, stay with me now, we already did this dying thing once with Thanos and it sucked then. You don’t need an encore.”

Penny groaned, but she was still somewhat aware when Dr. Strange knelt down next to her. He examined her vitals and cursed before opening another portal.

“Get her to MedBay,” he told Wanda. “I think the stab wound punctured her lung. She needs immediate help.”

Wanda nodded and picked Penny up again, running through the portal and into the MedBay in the Tower. “Someone, help!” she screamed, and watched as a flurry of nurses and doctors rushed out to meet her. “Spider-Woman is hurt badly. Dr. Strange thinks she might have gotten stabbed in a lung.”

Penny was taken from her and Wanda could only watch in horror as the doctors and nurses started taking emergency actions to save Penny’s life. Her suit was deactivated and her ratty sports bra was cut away, and then an oxygen mask was put on her face, with a nurse running to grab an intubation kit for the surgery they were rushing her into.

Wanda fell into a chair, covered in Penny’s blood, and she was still there when Tony rushed down to MedBay. He looked pale as a sheet and when he saw the state Wanda was in, he almost collapsed.

“Is Penny okay?” he asked, his voice strangled. “Wanda, tell me!”

“They just rushed her into surgery,” Wanda said softly. “She was stabbed in battle. I got her here as quickly as I could.”

Tony’s legs did give out then, and he sat in a nearby chair. It seemed like he was trying to avoid throwing up, and despite their history, Wanda didn’t blame him – she wanted to throw up too.

“I – I should probably get back out there,” Wanda said, but Tony shook his head.

“Your head isn’t in the game,” he said. “You go out now and you’ll end up in a bed next to her.”

Wanda opened her mouth to argue but she couldn’t. She stared at her hands, still covered in blood, and nodded.

“I should – I should probably get cleaned up, then,” she tried, and Tony grimaced in sympathy.

“You go do that,” he responded. “I’ll stay here and watch out for Penny. I’ll – I’ll let you know if something changes.”

Wanda nodded and went to wash off. She and Penny had both been injured in battles before, sometimes together, sometimes seriously. It never got any easier.

By the time she was done, the rest of the team was back. There were a few people who were banged up, but none as badly as Penny had been. She went to go see how Penny was doing, but Tony was still there in front of the door to MedBay.

“They’re still working on her,” Tony said. “She crashed right after they got her on the table, but since they got her back her vitals have been holding steady-ish.”

Wanda gaped and her hands glowed red for a moment. “You said you would tell me!” she cried, and Tony put up his hands.

“I got the alert when she crashed,” he said, “and when Strange teleported you into the building. That’s why I came down here. I figured if he was sending people here, he was trying to save their life.”

Wanda calmed down, then, and slumped into a chair that wasn’t too close to Tony but also one that wasn’t too far from the door. “I am sorry,” she said, resting her hands in her head. “I should not have assumed you broke your word.”

Tony waved it away. “We’re both pretty touchy right now,” he responded. “As long as you don’t break anything I can’t fix or pay other people to fix, we’re okay.”

Wanda smiled a little at that. Tony stepped out to call Aunt May and MJ, with both promising to get to the Tower as soon as possible, and then Pepper, to let her know what happened. Sam stopped in at one point, to check on Penny, and then went back the team apartments to make sure Bucky’s concussion was alright.

Penny made it through the surgery well, and she was placed in a recovery room immediately after. Her super-healing would kick in after it burned through the anesthetics the doctors used on her, and she wouldn’t be able to go web-slinging for a week, but it was a small price to pay considering how bad it could have been.

Dr. Cho didn’t let everyone crowd around Penny before she woke up, so when she did, Tony and Wanda were the ones next to her bed. MJ was going to be there soon – she was coming from Harlem, where she had been babysitting her cousin – and Aunt May was coming as soon as she got off work.

“Hey guys,” Penny croaked, feeling alongside the edge of the bed for the button that would help her sit up without aggravating her chest wound. “Wanda, thanks for the save.”

“If you make me do that again, Penny Parker, I am going to smother you with a pillow during movie night,” Wanda threatened.

Penny found the button and breathed a little easier when she was a little more vertical. “Thanks,” she said. “Love you too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has left comments and kudos. You guys have made this an incredible Whumptober and I'm grateful for your support.
> 
> To say thank you, I'm making the last chapter super whumpy. Much love!


	30. Now Where Did That Come From?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wound Reveal, Ignoring an Injury

It was her first mission with the Avengers and Penny was nervous.

Mr. Stark had given her a rundown of how to act and what to expect when he asked her to be a part of it. They’d been investigating an international weapons dealer that was using Chitauri tech, and they needed both her skill set and her experience with the weapons.

Penny was a little over the moon. Even though she wasn’t an official Avenger, they still wanted her to come along.

Some of that excitement was dampened on the way there. Penny was a bit of a chatterbox when she was nervous or excited or scared and she could tell it wasn’t appreciated. Hawkeye was glaring at her, and Black Widow was giving her a look like she was figuring out how best to use Penny’s own mask to suffocate and/or choke her, so Penny shut up and kept her hands in her lap and tried to focus on what they were doing.

“Alright, team,” Captain America said, and Penny’s attention focused on him. “We’re almost at the site. Spider-Woman, you and Widow are our eyes and ears. Get into the facility quickly and quietly, see what kind of ground forces we’re working with today. Intel says it should be minimal but I want to check before we head in.”

Black Widow nodded and Penny did too, a swooping feeling in her stomach. She was working with one of the biggest badasses on the team! Now was not the time to embarrass herself by being too childish or messing things up for them. Black Widow got a window open for them while the others established a perimeter for the mission.

Penny stuck to the ceilings and Black Widow to the shadows. “Place is empty, Cap,” Black Widow reported, and Penny felt a little weird when she heard it. Not quite the sense of immediate danger, but a sense that something was off. “I haven’t even seen a guard patrol yet. Keep your guard up.”

“Copy that, Widow,” Cap responded, and Penny snuck along ahead, checking around the corner. No one there, either.

Even when Penny patrolled the streets of Queens she never met such little resistance. And she was usually dealing with small-time bike and auto thieves, not international Chitauri arms dealers.

Penny released herself from the ceiling and landed on the floor in front of Black Widow. When she did, though, she set off an alarm. She and Black Widow both flattened themselves on the floor, but not before Penny felt a sting in her shoulder.

“Cap, this place is a trap!” Black Widow yelled, and pulled Penny behind her as more and more traps started going off. They barely made it back to the room they came in through before a large, sturdy-looking barrier closed behind them.

“Are weapons dealers usually know for their traps?” Penny asked, still trying to figure out what happened. “Because I’ve been trapped by one before, but it was a lot less intricate than this was.”

Black Widow shook her head. “If they’re not home, they wouldn’t go through all of this trouble,” she said. “An abandoned base wouldn’t have power or water anymore, and this place has both. People are here, and now they know we are too.”

“Dammit,” Penny said softly. “I’m sorry, Ms. Black Widow, ma’am. I didn’t mean to tip them off like that.”

Natasha shook her head. “If you hadn’t have stepped there I would have. Now is not the time to be worrying about that.”

They kept moving. There was another entrance Black Widow wanted to try and Penny went along with her. The inside of her arm kept stinging, but she didn’t want to interrupt the mission for something that was probably minor.

Black Widow found a control room and went into it. There were four men in there, and Black Widow took out three while Penny was still on her first one. Penny marveled at the older woman’s speed and experience, but Black Widow wasn’t there to show off – she was hacking the mainframe and letting the other Avengers into the facility.

“Alright, guys,” Widow started, speaking into her comm. “There’s a fairly large group coming to the main floor where Penny and I am, so if you could meet us here that would be great.”

The other Avengers rushed to their position but they didn’t get there before the goon squad did. Penny and Widow were holding their own pretty well, but Penny was slow and rough compared to how she normally was. Widow noticed, but before she could say anything the rest of the Avengers were there and the henchmen had been taken out.

“Our original objective was to come here and take out the weapons facility, and gather as much information as we could,” Cap said, as everyone regrouped after the battle. “Widow, you got the way into their servers, didn’t you?”

Widow nodded. “They didn’t have much in terms of encryption.”

“Alright,” Cap said, “in that case, I want us to clear the building to make sure they aren’t working on anything else they don’t have in their records and then blow this place sky-high. Got it, team?”

Everyone nodded, and Cap grouped up people to take different routes. Penny was grouped with Tony and Thor, to balance out the power with flexibility and some stealth capabilities, and they were told to go down the south entrance.

Before the group split off, Widow cast a look at Penny. Penny was desperately trying to hide the fact that the stinging in her arm was getting worse, and she was doing that by keeping her arms clasped behind her back. Widow was pretty sure something was wrong, but she didn’t know Penny well enough to know if it was serious or just a nervous tick.

In the end, Penny wasn’t needed that much for most of the rest of the mission, and she hung to the back and watched as the proper Avengers did their thing. Thor’s lightning was incredible to see in person, and Penny would never get tired of watching Iron Man unleash the unibeam.

They managed to get back to the plane, and when they were safe, Penny decided to risk a look at her elbow. It was slightly swollen, but what had Penny most concerned was the almost needle-like thing sticking out of it.

Black Widow grabbed her elbow then, and Penny felt the pain go from the worrying stinging to an outright stab. “Hey!” she said, trying to take her elbow back, but Widow held firm.

“You got this on the mission,” Widow said, narrowing her eyes. It clearly wasn’t a question. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because we were on a mission and it didn’t feel like it needed attention,” Penny said, feeling a little guilty. “I was still fighting, wasn’t I?”

“Badly,” Widow replied. “Roll up your sleeve. I want to see the skin.”

Fortunately, the material was stretchy, so Penny just rolled up her sleeve from the gloves to just past her elbow. The area was bright red and warm, and Widow put the thing Penny pulled out of the wound in a glass container.

“We can examine this when we get home,” Widow said, frowning.

That’s when Tony came back from the front of the plane, where he had been talking to Clint as he was getting ready to take off. “Examine what when we get home?” Tony asked, and then saw Penny’s elbow. “Good god, ‘Roos, what happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” Penny said uncomfortably. “I think it happened when Widow and I were scouting. I stepped on the wrong bit of floor. I thought it just got us attention, but I might have gotten this too.”

Tony looked worried. “You and Nat scouted the area hours ago,” he said. “You should have said something then.”

“It was my first mission!” Penny replied, her voice squeaking a little. “I just didn’t want to be a burden or get in your way.”

“I would much rather have you make a scene over nothing than get taken out because you ignored something important,” Tony told her, and then sat next to her. He examined the swollen area too and sighed. “This doesn’t look great but considering you didn’t get shot and the team did get our objectives done, you can probably call this one a pass. Gold star, kid. Good work.”

Penny laughed for a second and then realized those were the actual standards. “Wow,” she said. “Your expectations are really low.”

“They have to be, with Barton on the team,” Widow said, and they all heard Hawkeye squawk from the front. “Ignore him,” she continued, “and you’ll be fine.”

Penny was examined by the medical team when they got back. Dr. Banner looked at the substance Penny got hit with under the microscope and determined it was a ketamine-derivative; it was most likely meant to stun, not kill. Dr. Cho’s team figured out that the swelling was an allergic reaction, and Penny was given some super Benadryl to take to help ease the swelling.

Cap was going to debrief them later, when Tony had a chance to go through some of the data they found, and Penny was looking forward to officially wrapping up her first mission as a part-time Avenger. Until then, though, he said she was free to do whatever, so she ended up in the game room playing Mario Kart against Hawkeye.

Thanks to a blue shell, she was winning.

Her life was weird, but she liked it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has stuck around and kept reading through this challenge! I'm still trying to figure out what to write next, but I know when I do I'll have a lovely community of readers to support me, and that means so much to me.


	31. Today's Special: Torture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Experiment, Left for Dead
> 
> Tw: blood, needles, general darkness associated with torture and medical fuckery

Penny was grabbed during her normal patrols.

In hindsight, it was a trap, but it wasn’t that obvious when she first checked out the abandoned industrial warehouse. It had been a hideout for the homeless, so when Tia Maria started sleeping on Whitney Avenue, Penny was confused and went to check it out.

At first, it was some light surveillance. Penny recognized it immediately as HYDRA, and she was in the middle of making a report for the others when her spider-sense went off in a MAJOR way. She had time to turn and see a sniper below her aiming directly up before she was hit with something that turned her limbs into jelly.

Penny felt herself almost peel off the ceiling as she fell to the ground. Nothing cracked, but she knew it was going to be painful for some time. She tried to get up, but she saw HYDRA agents quickly surround her.

“Oh, looky here, boys,” one of the goons said. “We caught ourselves a spider.”

Penny was trying to move but she couldn’t. Her limbs felt leaden and when she moved her mouth to try to quip at them, her tongue felt heavy and foreign in her mouth.

What had they gotten her with?

Someone punched her hard in the chest and she coughed, hard, but was faced with horror when she realized he’d gotten her on the spider she tapped to release the suit. The fabric came away from her body and the men stared at her. She only had a sports bra and a light pair of shorts to prevent the suit from chafing around her thighs.

Then someone grabbed her mask off her face and Penny realized there was no coming back from this for her.

“She’s just a kid,” one of the henchmen said, and the leader looked at her with derision.

“She’s been a pain in our ass for years,” he replied. “Pick her up, tie her up and put her in the back of the van. If she’s here, her friends might not be far away and we don’t want to be here when they realize what happened.”

Penny tried to fight through the disconnection between her limbs and her mind, but it was no use. The most she could do was wiggle slightly and the guys laughed at her for even trying that. They bound her ankles and wrists and blindfolded her before tossing her into the back of a van.

Penny tried doing that one trick that she saw in the movies, where the hero being kidnapped could tell where they were by the bumps the bad guys drove over, but there was no use for it – she didn’t know the shape of the roads nearly well enough for that.

The paralytic started wearing off, and Penny moved her legs a little, but what she didn’t know – couldn’t see – was that this band of HYDRA was smart. They’d assigned a goon specifically to watch for when that started to happen and when it did they topped her up.

In fact, they gave her so much that it was genuinely difficult for her to breathe. Penny had to forget all thought of possible rescue and focus on making sure she was getting enough oxygen.

Eventually, they got to wherever they were taking her and Penny was once again picked up and carried somewhere. The building was cold, and they dumped her shivering ass into an even colder cement cell before attaching her to what felt like old-school manacles. She was still blindfolded, and when curled up into a ball she heard even more laughter.

“This is the mighty Spider-Woman?” Penny heard someone ask. Their voice was heavily German-accented and a chill ran down her spine, completely unrelated to the physical temperature she was in. “I expected her to be older.”

“We did too,” someone else said, and Penny heard the sound of a door lock as people walked away. Her heart clenched and she started crying, scared and alone and freezing.

She had no idea where she was and she didn’t think the team would, either.

Somehow she fell into a fitful, uneasy sleep, and when she woke up, Penny was able to remove her blindfold. There was a small toilet and sink, and while Penny wasn’t under any illusions about the level of privacy she had in the facility, she did need to go.

As soon as she’d washed her hands, drying them on her shorts, the door opened. A severe-looking man stepped forward and Penny took an instinctual step back.

“Hello, child,” the man said. He was dressed in a white lab coat, but he had the air of someone who was not afraid to get his hands dirty to achieve his goals. Someone who was used to being listened to. “My name is Dr. Grausam. Can you tell me your name?”

“It’s ‘go fuck yourself’,” she said. “You can either call me Spider-Woman or go fuck yourself. It’s your choice.”

His lip turned up in a sneer. “Ah,” he said, “you’re a young sarcastic hero who likes to run at the mouth. How original.”

“It gets me through the day,” she said. “And that’s saying a lot, coming from the third-gen, fourth-rate Nazis. What’s it like pretending to be relevant?”

He chuckled and gestured to his henchmen, who forced Penny against the wall and put a needle in her neck. As she lost the struggle to stay awake, she felt long, cold fingers tilt her head so she would see Grausam when he spoke to her.

“Power is always relevant,” he said, and smiled, a ghastly sight. “And you’re going to give us some of yours.”

When she woke up again, she was strapped to a table. Her hands and feet were fastened into bright metallic cuffs, and when Penny looked around there were lots of weird and dangerous-looking gadgets around her, along with machines she vaguely recognized as medically-oriented.

“Ah, Penny, you’re finally awake,” Dr. Grausam said. “We didn’t know how long it would take for you to come back to us. It looks like you burn through drugs in about half the time it takes other people, but it depends on the drug. For example, the paralytic we used yesterday was almost entirely effective on you, but the sedative today went through your system very fast. Do you know why that is?”

“Even if I did I wouldn’t tell you,” Penny said. “Let me out of here!”

The doctor injected her again, and this time Penny understood. It was the same paralytic from the day before. “That will keep you still through this next part,” he said. “I think it’s because of your healing factor. We have often observed you taking heavy blows in the field, and just through the night we watched some of the injuries we inflicted heal without a trace.”

Dr. Grausam walked out of her line of sight and when he came back, he was holding a small, shiny scalpel.

“It’s a marvelous gift,” he continued, “and it must have been a great boon for you throughout your career. I just want to know… what it’s limitations are.”

Penny couldn’t scream. The drug ensured that. She could not open her jaw to make the noise that she wanted to make.

So as he approached her and the instrument dug into her skin, her breathing picked up and she started crying in pain.

Several hours later, Penny was dumped back into her cell. Her wounds were still bleeding sluggishly, and after she was dumped in some food was thrown in too. Nothing fancy – a pathetic looking sandwich and a cup she could use for getting water from the sink. An apple that had seen better days.

Penny would have reached for it, but the paralytic hadn’t worn off yet – and even if it had, she was too injured to crawl over and get it. She passed out in her bed, still freezing cold, with tears running down her face.

When she woke up sometime later, Penny was so hungry that she didn’t have a choice. She was shaking as she forced herself to get the food, her body still trembling after the abuse it had been put through. She felt a little better after she ate, and she could even force herself to stand long enough to get water, but she was still running on a severe calorie deficit. Penny limped back to the cot she had and wondered if she would survive long enough to see the team – to see MJ – to see any friendly face again.

It had been more than long enough. Someone had to know she was missing. Friday would have alerted Tony that she had been taken, right?

Penny held onto hope as she tried to sleep again. She couldn’t break yet. Her friends were going to be looking for her. They would come to save her, the same way that she’d watched them save so many others throughout the years they’d been working together.

Hope was hard to hold onto, though, as the days took on a sick rhythm. Penny couldn’t keep track of the days, but she knew she’d been there a while based on how hungry she was and how her healing factor was starting to break down.

Dr. Grausam noticed it too. Wounds he’d made were hanging around longer, and the deeper wounds he’d left were starting to get infected and fester. Penny was running a low-grade fever, which made the chill of the facility even worse, and her captors were not inclined to make anything about her stay with them more comfortable for her.

“So even the great Spider-Woman has limitations,” Dr. Grausam said, examining her. He wrote it down in a tablet he always carried around and then turned back to her. She was paralyzed again, and this time when he leaned in, he had a red-hot poker in his hand.

Penny barely had control over her mouth. She couldn’t contain the whimpers that would have otherwise been full-throated screams, and when the scent of her own flesh burning hit her nostrils, she only barely part her lips to let the vomit out of her mouth so she didn’t choke on it.

Later, when his experiments concluded for the day, Penny never found the strength to crawl across the floor and get her food. She just stayed there on her cot, staring at the ceiling.

Hope was slipping through her fingers.

One day, in the middle of the latest sick experiments, Dr. Grausam stepped away in the middle of his experiments. It was weird – when he was working, almost nothing could interrupt him – but Penny didn’t pay it much mind because she expected him to be back.

She didn’t expect to hear the sounds of a struggle or the red alert alarm. Dr. Grausam did come back to the lab but he was grabbing things out of her eyesight and she couldn’t turn her head. He came back into her view once more, looked harried, and his breathing was heavy.

“Well, Penny,” he said, and held up a needle, “it looks like your friends have decided to come free you. But I’ve gotten used to having you as my toy.” He looked angry, on edge, and Penny got nervous. “You’ve brought me so many hours of fun. And I don’t feel like sharing you.”

Dr. Grausam plunged the needle into her arm and she felt something spreading through the area around it.

“Goodbye, Spider-Woman,” Dr. Grausam said. “This is a vial of clonidine. We won’t be seeing each other again.”

He ran out of the room then and Penny struggled to move, panicking. For all she struggled, for all her strength, it wasn’t up to her, and she was once again in a fight just to keep breathing.

It was taking everything she had and then more. Penny had been in the clutches of HYDRA for several weeks at that point, and she was severely malnourished. The paralytic didn’t make her work any easier and Penny had almost given up entirely when she heard familiar voices.

“She has to be around here somewhere,” Tony said, clearly frustrated. “We’ve searched all of the other HYDRA facilities we know of. Spider-Woman has to be in this one.”

“No one was in the holding cells,” Rhodey said, and his voice sounded worried. “It looked like someone had been in there recently, though – there was a cup in the room, with a little bit of water still in it. Maybe this is the one with Penny.”

Even from her position on the table, Penny could hear how Rhodey was trying to give Tony a reason to keep searching.

The door opened wider, and then there was a gasp and the sound of feet hitting the floor as people ran closer to her. Tony’s face appeared in Penny’s line of view and she started openly sobbing.

“Oh my god, Penny,” he said softly, and his hand was hovering over her like he wanted to hold her but he was afraid to. “What have they done to you?”

He called the team to his position as he and Rhodey worked to loosen her restraints. Penny was still sobbing, but it was getting harder for her to breathe again, and the world started dimming as the lack of oxygen hit her hard.

“Penny, can you speak to us?” Tony asked softly, and the paralytic had worn off just enough for her to shake her head.

Tony frowned and picked her up off the table. “Rhodey, look around. See if you can find whatever is in her system. They left in a hurry; maybe they didn’t clean up after themselves.”

Rhodey scanned the area and found a couple of used vials, including both the paralytic and the clonidine. “I don’t know enough medical to understand what this does,” he admitted. “My degrees are in aeronautical engineering, not pharmaceuticals. We need to get her back to the jet and get home.”

Tony nodded and let the team know that Penny needed immediate medical attention, so they were going to rendezvous at the jet. There only barely enough room for both him and Rhodey to fly back through the halls but they managed it, and Tony hooked Penny up to the jet’s in-flight medical suite.

“Her heart rate is really low,” Tony said, pushing some hair out of Penny’s eyes, “and I don’t like the way she’s breathing. Rhodey, what were those vials you found?”

“One that was just labeled ‘paralysis’”, Rhodey said, “and another that said clonidine.”

Tony frowned. “Okay, not much we can do on that first one,” he said, “but Friday, check out what that second one does.”

Friday read out a list of symptoms, and Tony and Rhodey looked down in horror as some of the symptoms matched up with what they were seeing in Penny. The difficulty breathing, the drowsiness, the slow heart rate.

“Okay,” Tony said, when Friday was done, more than a hint of panic in his voice. “Clearly Penny’s been dosed, so how do we – how do we fix that?”

“She needs supplemental oxygen,” Friday responded, “as well as naloxone, which is in the recovery drawer.”

Rhodey got it and applied it to her, trying not to think about the times he did the same thing for Tony before he got his shit together. They got an oxygen line started for her and covered her in a blanket, relieved when color started coming back into Penny’s face and her breathing got a little bit better.

“Back with us now, kid?” Tony asked, his face crinkled up with clear concern for her.

The paralytic was starting to wear off enough for Penny to nod and move her jaw. “I – Tony – oh my god,” Penny whispered, her voice weak after weeks of barely being able to use it. “Oh my god, Tony, oh my god.”

“I know the feeling, Pen,” Tony said, and the nanotech retreated so he could sit down on the bed next to her. He pulled her into his lap and hugged her tightly, and Penny couldn’t stop the tears. “I – you were gone for so long – we hit so many dead ends –”

The words were a balm for Penny. They confirmed, even without her asking, that the team had been out there looking for her, looking hard. She kept crying, and she was barely able to ball her fists into the back of his shirt, holding onto him with every ounce of strength she still had.

“They – they were keeping me alive to experiment on me,” Penny whispered. “Every day was something new. I – I couldn’t escape. I was almost constantly being drugged. I wanted to escape, Tony, I wanted to escape!”

Tony held her close, crying too. Penny hadn’t seen him cry before, but if there was a time to cry it was now. She was still covered in fresh and half-healed wounds, as well as the dingy sports bra and shorts she’d been captured in, and even though Tony and Rhodey successfully applied emergency measures her medical issues were far from solved.

“I know you wanted to,” Tony said, rubbing her back. It was relatively uninjured because Grausam, the sick fuck, liked to see the fear in Penny’s eyes when he tortured her, so most of the damage was on her abdomen, chest, arms or legs. “If you had a choice in any of this, you wouldn’t have been there. I know.”

The others got to the jet, then, and there was a collective gasp when they saw the condition Penny was in. “Okay,” Sam said, taking control. “Clint, you need to fly us back home. Call the Tower and let them know we’re on our way, and that Penny needs every hand on deck when we land. Widow, I’m going to need you to reach out to Soldier. He needs to know that he can stop looking through the international HYDRA bases now – we have her back. Wanda, you get to call Penny’s aunt and her girlfriend. You can tell them we found her, but don’t give too many specifics about how she’s doing, okay?”

“Anything I can do?” Rhodey asked, and Sam looked him over once before looking back to Penny.

“I’m going to need you to blow this place sky high with pretty much everything you have,” Sam said. “I want there to be a charred hole in the ground when the Google Earth satellites take their next picture of this place.”

Rhodey nodded firmly and left the plane while Clint was powering up the engines. There were several loud explosions and Penny instinctively cringed, curling more into Tony for protection. He held her close and soothed her, letting her know in a quiet voice everything was alright, and when Rhodey came back in the plane took off for home.

Penny wasn’t allowed to doze off on the flight home with the naloxone and the paralytic still in her system but even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. The other Avengers started seeing to her wounds as they flew, disinfecting the most recent ones while Tony continued to hold Penny in his lap. No one said a word about the arrangement, but a couple apologized to Penny for the fact that they didn’t find her sooner.

She didn’t know what to make of those apologies. Penny knew they were meant with all love and sincerity, and that it wasn’t their fault – or even hers – that she was stuck there for so long, but she couldn’t think about that when her brain was still stuck on receiving the first bit of warmth, comfort and love she’d had in several weeks.

Tony didn’t leave her side until they got back to the Tower and back to qualified medical help. Rhodey went to drop the vials off in the lab for Dr. Banner to examine and Wanda went to talk to MJ and Aunt May, who were both waiting eagerly to be reunited with Penny after weeks of tears and fears.

It was hours before Dr. Cho was done with Penny. Some of the wounds and burns were badly infected, to the point where they needed immediate treatment, and Penny was badly malnourished, which meant Cho spent some time figuring out how to best help her and get more calories in her system.

She ended up ordering Penny to drink at least two meal replacement shakes per day until they could get her food intake back up. The shakes were nasty, but they would get the job done.

Dr. Cho also ordered a psychiatric evaluation for Penny before she was allowed back out into the field. Bad stuff had happened to Penny before – many terrible, horrible things – but nothing to this degree. Penny nodded, and a nurse helped her into a wheelchair before taking her to a familiar recovery room.

Within minutes of the nurse getting Penny adjusted, including with pillows and an extra blanket, Tony and every other Avenger in the building was outside her door. Dr. Cho restricted the visitors to only a few at a time and Tony was one of the first in.

“How are you feeling, Penny?” he asked, sitting next to her.

“Dr. Cho took good care of me,” Penny answered, feeling exhausted. The bed was warm and comfy, and she was finally out of those fucking shorts and that goddamn sports bra and into a pair of Avengers-themed pajamas. “HYDRA knocked me down, but I’m not out.”

Tony smiled, really smiled, and tucked the blankets around her. “No, but it looks like you’re passing out anyway, ‘Roos,” he said. “We can talk when you wake up.”

Penny yawned and nodded before remembering that she wasn’t alone. Tony, Nat, Bucky and a couple of other Avengers had all been tortured before, some at the hands of HYDRA, and weirdly enough it made her feel better. She’d been through hell in the weeks she was gone, but there were people at home who understood what she’d been through.

It was going to take a while for her to heal, and she might not ever fully heal, but she was going to heal.

Penny fell asleep then, warm and safe and surrounded by the people who loved her. It meant more than she could say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has taken this journey with me!
> 
> I will be writing more as Penny. The updates will be a little more sporadic -- I'm going into my last month of grad school -- but I'm figuring out what the next story will look like. I'm open to suggestions, and you can kind me at princessofthewhitemoon.tumblr.com. Come say hi!


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